electron-webrtc

Use WebRTC in Node.js via a hidden Electron process

WebRTC is a powerful web API that lets browsers make peer-to-peer connections, and has already been deployed in many popular browsers. It may sometimes be useful to let Node.js programs use WebRTC, e.g. in webtorrent-hybrid. However, the modules for WebRTC in Node (node-webrtc and node-rtc-peer-connection) are either hard to install, broken, or incomplete.

As a hack, this module talks to an invisible Electron instance in the background (using electron-eval) to use Chromium's built-in WebRTC implementation.

Status

This module is compatible with simple-peer and passes its tests.

electron-webrtc is intended for use with RTCDataChannels, so the MediaStream API is not supported.

Usage

npm install electron-webrtc

// call exported function to create Electron process
var wrtc = require('electron-webrtc')()

// handle errors that may occur when trying to communicate with Electron
wrtc.on('error', function (err) { console.log(err) })

// uses the same API as the `wrtc` package
var pc = new wrtc.RTCPeerConnection(config)

// compatible with `simple-peer`
var peer = new SimplePeer({
  initiator: true,
  wrtc: wrtc
})

// listen for errors
wrtc.on('error', function (err, source) {
  console.error(err)
})

Methods

`var wrtc = require('electron-webrtc')([opts])`

Calling the function exported by this module will create a new hidden Electron process. It is recommended to only create one, since Electron uses a lot of resources.

An optional opts object may contain specific options (including headless mode). See electron-eval

The object returned by this function has the same API as the node-webrtc package.

Any errors that occur when communicating with the Electron daemon will be emitted by the wrtc object (wrtc.on('error', ...)).

`wrtc.close()`

Closes the Electron process and releases its resources. You may not need to do this since the Electron process will close automatically after the Node process terminates.

Properties

`wrtc.electronDaemon`

A handle to the electron-eval daemon that this module uses to talk to the Electron process.

Events

- `error`

Emitted by RTCPeerConnection or RTCDataChannel when daemon.eval() evaluates code that throws an internal error.

Running on a headless server

Chromium normally won't run on a headless server since it expects a screen that it can render to. So to work around this, we can use Xvfb, a utility that creates a framebuffer that Chromium can use as a virtual screen.

First, install Xvfb:

apt-get install xvfb # Ubuntu/Debian
yum install xorg-x11-server-Xvfb # CentOS

Create the HEADLESS env variable:

export HEADLESS=true

Or if you want to do it programmatically, initialize a new instance and pass in headless as a key as demonstrated:

var wrtc = require('electron-webrtc')({ headless: true })

Now you may run your WebRTC code with electron-webrtc :)

Related Modules

Current Tags

0.3.0 ... latest (8 years ago)