autobase-discovery/README.md

Automatic service discovery with self-registering services, using autobase

# Autobase Discovery

Automatic service discovery with self-registering services, using [autobase](https://github.com/holepunchto/autobase). Works well with [protomux-rpc](https://github.com/holepunchto/protomux-rpc) services.

Clients discover the RPC services by querying the autodiscovery's [hyperdb](https://github.com/holepunchto/hyperdb), which is an autobase view.

See [autobase-discovery-cli](https://github.com/holepunchto/autobase-discovery-cli) for running as a CLI.

## Install

```
npm i autobase-discovery
```

## Usage

### Security

Autodiscovery uses a simple security model, taking advantage of the authentication mechanism of HyperDHT.

All clients who wish to register to the autodiscovery service know a shared secret seed (64 bytes). This seed is passed to the autodiscovery clients, which deterministically generate a DHT keyPair. This keyPair is then used to open a connection to the autodiscovery RPC server.

The autodiscovery service is passed the public key corresponding to the secret seed upon startup, and only sets up the RPC endpoints for peers with that public key.

The security relies on HyperDHT fully opening a connection only after the server verified that the client knows the secret key corresponding to its public key.

Note: to check which public key corresponds to a seed, run:

```
HyperDHT.keyPair(Buffer.from(seed, 'hex')).publicKey.toString('hex')
```

(assuming `seed` is in hexadecimal notation)

### Server

See [autobase-discovery-cli](https://github.com/holepunchto/autobase-discovery-cli).

### Client

See [example.js](example.js) for the programmatic way of self-registering a service instance.