📡 IronWire

A minimal, secure, and extensible real-time messaging server written in Rust, designed as the foundation for a full-featured messenger with voice/video messages, file sharing, and WebRTC calls.

Built with performance, correctness, and modularity in mind — leveraging axum, tokio, and modern async Rust.

Status: ✅ MVP core complete — authentication, text messaging, and file uploads working.

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✨ Features (Current)

• WebSocket-based real-time communication
• Authentication via token (JWT-ready)
• Peer-to-peer text messaging (online users only)
• File upload endpoint (POST /upload) with unique URLs
• Modular architecture (easy to extend)
• No external database required for MVP (state kept in memory)

Video/audio "circle" messages and WebRTC calls are not yet implemented (planned).

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🚀 Quick Start

Prerequisites

• Rust (1.70+)
• cargo
• (Optional) websocat for CLI testing

Run the Server

git clone https://github.com/zornfeuer/ironwire
cd ironwire
cargo run

The server will start on http://0.0.0.0:8080.

Test Authentication & Messaging

1. Open two terminals.
2. In each, connect via WebSocket:

websocat ws://localhost:8080/ws

3. In both, authenticate (use different tokens):

{"type":"auth","payload":{"token":"alice"}}
{"type":"auth","payload":{"token":"bob"}}

You should receive:

{"type":"auth_ok"}

4. From alice, send a message to bob:

{"type":"text","payload":{"to":"bob","text":"Hello from Alice!"}}

5. bob will receive:

{"type":"text","payload":{"from":"alice","text":"Hello from Alice!"}}

Upload a File

Send POST request to http://localhost:8080/upload for example with curl:

curl -X POST --data-binary @yourfile.mp4 http://localhost:8080/upload

Response:

{"url":"/media/abcd1234.bin"}

Access it at: http://localhost:8080/media/abcd1234.bin

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📂 Project Structure

src/
├── main.rs              # Entry point
├── messages.rs          # Message types (ClientMessage, AppMessage)
├── state.rs             # Shared in-memory state (online users)
├── ws.rs                # Just forwarding ws submodules
├── http.rs              # Just forwarding http submodules
├── ws/                  # WebSocket session logic
│   ├── session.rs       # Per-connection state & message handling
│   └── handler.rs       # WebSocket upgrade handler
└── http/                # HTTP handlers (upload, fallback)
    ├── upload.rs
    └── fallback.rs

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🗺️ Roadmap

Feature	Status
Text messaging	✅ Done
File uploads	✅ Done
Audio/video "circle" msgs	⏳ Planned
End-to-end encryption	⏳ Planned
WebRTC voice/video calls	⏳ Planned
Message history (SQLite)	⏳ Planned
Offline message queue	⏳ Planned
Group chats	⏳ Planned

The protocol is custom (not XMPP or Matrix), allowing full control over features and performance.

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🔒 Security Notes

• All connections should be served over TLS in production (add rustls support).
• Authentication currently treats the token as the user ID (for MVP).
  → Will be replaced with JWT validation.
• File uploads are stored on disk with random UUIDs (no execution allowed).
• Input validation and rate limiting will be added before production use.

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🛠️ Built With

• axum – Web framework
• tokio-tungstenite – WebSocket support
• serde – Serialization
• dashmap – Concurrent in-memory state
• tracing – Structured logging

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📜 License

MIT — see LICENSE for details.

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💡 Contributions, suggestions, and security feedback are welcome!
This project is designed to be minimal, auditable, and privacy-respecting from the ground up.