Connect A to B. Send Data.

In 2023 it's hard to connect two devices directly. Dumb pipe punches through NATs, using on-the-fly node identifiers. It even keeps your machines connected as network conditions change.

What you actually do with that connection is up to you.

A unix pipe between computers

$ curl -sL https://www.dumbpipe.dev/install.sh | sh

get dumbpipe with a single command on two computers, connect them & pipe data from one machine to the other. No accounts. No configuration.

Receiver

$ ./dumbpipe listen
using secret key 23ryys7pgvjrr57pcrvyivdrhvqyykg2tv3leou5grm66xfd7zzq
Listening. To connect, use:
./dumbpipe connect nodeecsxraxjtqtneathgplh6d5nb2rsnxpfulmkec2rvhwv3hh6m4rdgaibamaeqwjaegplgayaycueiom6wmbqcjqaibavg5hiaaaaaaaaaaabaau7wmbq
                  

Sender

echo "hello" | ./dumbpipe connect nodeecsxraxjtqtneathgplh6d5nb2rsnxpfulmkec2rvhwv3hh6m4rdgaibamaeqwjaegplgayaycueiom6wmbqcjqaibavg5hiaaaaaaaaaaabaau7wmbq
                  

This will work, regardless of where the two machines are. Dumb pipe finds a way.

Put a dumb pipe in your app

Dumb pipes are Iroh Connections. The dumbpipe tool is a 200-line wrapper around the iroh-net rust crate. You can use the iroh connection layer as a dumb pipe in your own app.

QUIC & Dumb

These dumb pipes use QUIC over a magic socket. It may be dumb, but it still has all the features of a full QUIC connection: UDP-based, stream-multiplexing and encrypted. Besides using the multiplexed streams you can also use multiple connections each with their own ALPN.

Sometimes you gotta relay

For somewhere around 10-20% of connections, it's simply not possible to connect two devices directly. For those cases, we use a meshed network of relay nodes to pack up UDP traffic & send it over HTTP. Sounds silly, but it works. And the magic socket handles all this under the hood.

Coming soon: Premium relays

The team behind number0 runs the default relay network, which has a capped bandwidth. High-throughput, authenticated relays are coming to iroh.network in the future.

Need more?

Need pubsub? Data transfer? Sync? All of these are opt-in addons from iroh. But if you add these things, the pipe is no longer dumb. You decide how to feel about that.