This repository contains the code for CryptPad server.

Architecture

Taxonomy

The new server architecture is composed of three types of nodes:

• Core: these nodes take care of most of the computations and internal communication handling. They are connected to the other type of servers.
• Front: these nodes catch the different queries from the outside and forward them to the core nodes for processing.
• Storage: these nodes are responsible for accessing and serving a fraction of the (encrypted) data for CryptPad. They are also doing light computation if they can be done in place without too much pressure on them.

Topology

The core nodes are connected to both front and storage nodes, but the latter two cannot communicate directly (only on the same layer).

Configuration

The configuration can be done in config/infra.js, which will store the graph topology of the nodes and how to connect to them.

Using websockets for communication, please look at config/infra.example.js for explanations.

Usage

To be used in CryptPad, this repository releases are available on npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/cryptpad-server

You can also use it in standalone mode for development purpose. The client code should be present in ../cryptpad/ or in a clientRoot property as a string in config/config.js. Before first use, you may want to install the dependencies and build the code with:

npm install
npm run build

To spawn the server topology described in infra/config.js, run the start script:

npm run start

Alternatively, you can the new servers manually. You first need to start the core nodes with the following command.

For that to work, you need to have a shared key between the different nodes to authenticate them, which can be generated with:

openssl rand -base64 32

Then add the resulting random bytes in private.nodes_key property in your config/config.js.

node index.js --type core --index 0

Then you can start a front and storage nodes in any order:

node index.js --type front --index 0
node index.js --type storage --index 0
node index.js --type front --index 1
node index.js --type storage --index 2
node index.js --type storage --index 1

Alternatively, you can identify different sets of nodes with the serverId property of their corresponding nodes in config/infra.js, and start a subset of them sharing the same serverId with:

node index.js --server [serverId value]

Tests

The directory tests contains some unit and integration tests scripts and files.

• interface.test.js: test the communication interface by implementing a simple ping-pong protocol that computes the time it takes to go back and forth in the network.

The aforementioned tests can be run with the following command (make sure to have installed the dependencies with npm install beforehand):

npm run tests