pear-docs/guide/making-a-pear-terminal-app.md

Making a Pear Terminal Application

This guide demonstrates how to build a peer-to-peer chat application.

It continues where Starting a Pear Terminal Project left off.

[Build with Pear - Episode 04: Pear Terminal Applications]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73KVE0wocTE

Step 1. Install modules

For the chat part of the app, the same modules are needed as in Making a Pear Desktop Application, hyperswarm, b4a, hypercore-crypto.

To read input we will want to use readline, but it's important that Pear does not run on Node.js. Instead it runs on Bare. Bare is a lightweight javascript runtime which means it does not include a lot of the standard library modules as Node.js does. To use the bare equivalent the modules bare-readline and bare-tty are needed

npm i bare-readline bare-tty hyperswarm b4a hypercore-crypto

Step 2. JavaScript

Replace index.js with

import Hyperswarm from 'hyperswarm'
import b4a from 'b4a'
import crypto from 'hypercore-crypto'
import readline from 'bare-readline'
import tty from 'bare-tty'

const { teardown, config } = Pear
const key = config.args.pop()
const shouldCreateSwarm = !key
const swarm = new Hyperswarm()
const log = console.log
const rl = readline.createInterface({
  input: new tty.ReadStream(0),
  output: new tty.WriteStream(1)
})

swarm.on('connection', peer => {
  const name = b4a.toString(peer.remotePublicKey, 'hex').substr(0, 6)
  console.log(`[info] New peer joined, ${name}`)
  peer.on('data', message => appendMessage({ name, message }))
})
swarm.on('update', () => {
  console.log(`[info] Number of connections is now ${swarm.connections.size}`)
})

if (shouldCreateSwarm) {
  await createChatRoom()
} else {
  await joinChatRoom(key)
}

rl.input.setMode(tty.constants.MODE_RAW)
rl.on('data', line => {
  sendMessage(line)
  rl.prompt()
})
rl.prompt()

async function createChatRoom () {
  const topicBuffer = crypto.randomBytes(32)
  await joinSwarm(topicBuffer)
  const topic = b4a.toString(topicBuffer, 'hex')
  console.log(`[info] Created new chat room: ${topic}`)
}

async function joinChatRoom (topicStr) {
  const topicBuffer = b4a.from(topicStr, 'hex')
  await joinSwarm(topicBuffer)
  console.log(`[info] Joined chat room`)
}

async function joinSwarm (topicBuffer) {
  const discovery = swarm.join(topicBuffer, { client: true, server: true })
  await discovery.flushed()
}

function sendMessage (message) {
  const peers = [...swarm.connections]
  for (const peer of peers) peer.write(message)
}

function appendMessage ({ name, message }) {
  console.log(`[${name}] ${message}`)
}

Step 3. Run in dev mode

To test this chat app, in one terminal run pear dev ..

The app will output something similar to:

[info] Created new chat room: a1b2c35fbeb452bc900c5a1c00306e52319a3159317312f54fe5a246d634f51a

In another terminal use this key as input, pear dev . a1b2c35fbeb452bc900c5a1c00306e52319a3159317312f54fe5a246d634f51a.

The app will output:

[info] Number of connections is now 0
[info] New peer joined, 6193ec
[info] Number of connections is now 1
[info] Joined chat room

Type something in one app, and see that the two apps are now connected and can talk!

Next

• Sharing a Pear Application