Portal

Send JSON messages from anywhere to anywhere with 0 configuration.

Quickstart

npm i message-portal

First make keys for Alice and Bob (repeat this twice):

import { generatePrivateKey, getPublicKey } from "message-portal";

const privateKey = generatePrivateKey();
console.log(getPublicKey(privateKey), privateKey);

Then on Alice’s machine:

import { connect } from "message-portal";

const alicePrivateKey = "...";
const bobPublicKey = "...";

connect({
  privateKey: alicePrivateKey,
  onMessage: ({ from, payload }) =>
    Promise.resolve(console.log(`Bob (${from}) says`, payload)),
  onClose: () => {},
}).then(({ send }) => {
  send({
    to: bobPublicKey,
    payload: { text: "hello Bob! I've sent you this json." },
  }).then(() => {
    console.log("Bob has acked!");
  });
});

On Bob’s machine:

import { connect } from "message-portal";

const bobPrivateKey = "...";
const alicePublicKey = "...";

connect({
  privateKey: bobPrivateKey,
  onMessage: ({ from, payload }) =>
    Promise.resolve(console.log(`Alice (${from}) says`, payload)),
  onClose: () => {},
}).then(({ send }) => {
  send({
    to: alicePublicKey,
    payload: "hello Alice, here's a string message.",
  }).then(() => {
    console.log("Alice has acked!");
  });
});

Motivation

Somehow it’s still frustrating to send messasges between pieces of codes.

Typical quotes:

• “I only know how to set up networking on GCP, not on AWS”
• “I need the devops guy to help me with helm, but they’re not available right now”
• “Turns out I need two way communication, so now I need to have a socket alongside my http connections 🤦”
• “I can’t get the messages to go through this firewall”

It is a sad fact that even when you just want to pass messages from point A to point B, you still need to consider the surrounding environment:

1. static ips or domain
2. opening ports to the hosting machine
3. configurations of cloud environments (heroku, amazon, gcp etc’)
4. Persistent connection (socket) or transient (http).

We would like a better abstraction over message passing.

Using portal you can worry about this later or not at all, and simply npm install in two locations, plug in a string you generate locally, and you get instant connectivity.

How does it work

Implementation is very simple - e2e encrypted messages are passed through a socket connecion to a third party server, running open source code.

Messages are e2e encrypted, so the server cannot look into them.