DIZTL

A peer-to-peer file discovery and sharing tool for LANs written in Go!

Getting started

The diztl project is written in Go with the frontend implementation in Java using JavaFX. To get started, run the following commands:

go get -v github.com/gravetii/diztl/...

Diztl requires Java 8 to be installed on the host machine for the UI to work.

Configuration steps

Make a copy of the config-template.yml which is a bare-bones configuration file for diztl, and name it config.yml - cp config-template.yml config.yml. The config.yml file is the actual config file required for diztl to work. If you want to make any changes to the configuration, this is the file you want to edit. Note that this file is untracked in the repo (unlike the config-template.yml) which ensures that changes specific to your environment aren't reflected publicly. If any changes are to be reflected publicly, they need to go into the config-template.yml file.
Optionally, you can also add the config.yml entry in your .git/info/exclude file so that git doesn't prompt you to add it to the stage all the time.

Running diztl

In the root folder of the project:

go run tracker/main.go: This runs the tracker node on the localhost.
Specify the local IP address of the Tracker in the config.yml file to allow Nodes to connect to it.
go run node/main.go: Run this anywhere on any machine in the network to fire up a Node.
Fire up the UI (for this, currently, you'll have to build the code located in the ui folder and run it) and discover/share/download files in your network.

Implementation

Diztl consists of two main components:

Tracker: The Tracker's responsibility is to allow co-ordination and communication between the different Nodes.
Node: A Node is basically any peer in the network. It can share resources as well as request for and download resources from other Nodes in the network.

The current implementation isn't completely decentralized in that the search queries from a Node are sent to the Tracker which then broadcasts the request across all peers in the network, requesting them to reply back with the files they have that might be of interest to the caller Node.

Once the requesting Node decides on the file it wants to download from the target peer, communication happens solely between the two peers without any intervention from the Tracker.

When the Node first starts up, it indexes all the files to be shared in the default share folder located under <user_root>/Documents/diztl/share. By default, downloaded files are located under /downloads directory of the shared folder. The Node then connects to the Tracker and registers itself after which it can participate in the network and communicate with other nodes. The share and downloads folders can be configured by changing the corresponding configurations in the config.yml file (requires restart of tracker and/or node).

For the formats of different request-response structures, take a look at the diztl/diztl.proto file which contains the protobuf specifications as well as the gRPC service definitions.

The node UI is implemented in Java using JavaFX which communicates with the node's gRPC server to facilitate user actions.

Built With

gRPC: The project uses gRPC as its communication protocol along with protocol buffers as the data-interchange format.
JFoenix: JFoenix is the material design library for JavaFX.