akashhamirwasia/blaze-server repository overview

Blaze is a file sharing progressive web app(PWA) that allows users to transfer files between multiple devices. It works similar to SHAREit or the Files app by Google but uses web technologies to eliminate the process of installing native apps for different devices and operating systems. It also supports instant file sharing with multiple devices at once which many file sharing apps lack.

Blaze primarily uses WebTorrent⁠ and WebSockets protocol (as a fallback) to transfer files between multiple devices. Files shared via WebTorrent are peer-to-peer(as they use WebRTC internally) which means there is direct transfer between the sender and receiver without any intermediate server. Do note that tracker servers in WebTorrent are used which carry metadata and facilitate the file transfer but do not get the complete file in any form.

⁠Features

• 💡 No account creation or signups.
• 🚀 One-to-One and Many-to-Many file transfers.
• 🔮 Works across different networks and devices.
• ⚡ Easy to use, and no app installation required.
• 📱 PWA for device-level integrations.

⁠Try it out!

• Go to a deployed client of Blaze - https://blaze.now.sh⁠
• Set a basic nickname(this is not stored on any server)
• Create a new room. Room is where peers must join to share files among each other.
• On another device, follow the above steps and join the same room. (Make sure to give a different nickname)
• Both your devices should show up. Now start sharing some files!

Read more about how Blaze works at a basic level in this Medium article⁠.

⁠Deploy your own instance of Blaze

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Read more on Deploying on your own server⁠

⁠Sponsors

Blaze is sponsored by:

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⁠Build process

• For the frontend, webpack is setup internally via preact-cli. Overrides can be made in preact.config.js file.
• For the backend, sucrase⁠ is used to transform ES modules imports/exports to CommonJS.

⁠Running Blaze in production

Blaze can be easily deployed on your own server using Docker and docker-compose. The frontend and the backend is completely decoupled from each other.

⁠Docker images

Following Docker images are available:

• Blaze Server⁠: This is the backend Node.js server that is used for WebSockets communication. The environment variables listed for the server in previous section can be passed to the container. It exposes port 3030.
• Blaze Client⁠: This is the frontend progressive web app of Blaze used by clients for sharing files. Nginx is used as a web server for this statically generated frontend. The environment variables listed above must be passed as ARGS while building the image. The frontend container exposes port 80.
• Blaze⁠: This is a higher level image that includes both Blaze Server and Blaze Client images above. It must be used when docker-compose is not available in the environment, or there is a limit to run only a single container. docker-compose must be used to run Blaze in other cases which is explained in next section.

⁠Using docker-compose

A docker-compose.yml file is present at the root of this project which runs both the server and client containers and sets up a proxy for WebSocket connections on the frontend in Nginx configuration. To run using docker-compose:

git clone https://github.com/blenderskool/blaze
cd blaze
docker-compose up -d

⁠Directly via Node.js

Building the frontend

npm run build:fe

The frontend built code would be located in the client/build directory.

Starting the server and frontend app

npm start

Blaze app can now be accessed at port 8080 :tada:

⁠Privacy and Analytics

• Blaze server does not track or record the files that are being shared both by WebSockets and WebTorrent.
• Any user related data like nickname, room names are always stored on device, and are only shared with the server when the user joins a room for file sharing.
• Blaze client uses Google Analytics to record the following:
  • Basic visit data⁠ as recorded by Google Analytics⁠
  • If Blaze PWA is installed on the device, and whether files are shared using share targets.

⁠Contributing

Documentation on contributing can be found in CONTRIBUTING.md⁠

⁠License

Blaze is MIT Licensed⁠