RuneLink

RuneLink is an experimental federated messaging network with a Slack/Discord-style model: servers contain channels, and channels contain messages.

This repo contains:

• A Rust server implementation (runelink-server)
• A Rust CLI client (runelink-term, binary name: rune)
• A Rust client library (runelink-client) and shared API types (runelink-types) for building additional clients

Status: WIP. APIs and data model may change. Not security-audited.

What is RuneLink?

• Federated: many independent hosts can interoperate.
• Server structure: like Discord/Slack; join servers, talk in channels.
• Open client ecosystem: today's client is a CLI, but the intent is that the community can build their own clients against the HTTP API and/or runelink-client.

Concepts

• Host: a RuneLink deployment reachable at a host (in dev, typically on port 7000).
• User: an account on exactly one host (your home host).
• Server: a workspace/community that “lives on” some host.
• Channel: a room inside a server.

Repository layout

This is a Rust workspace (see Cargo.toml) with these crates:

• runelink-server: Axum HTTP server + Postgres persistence + federation endpoints.
• runelink-term: the rune CLI client (a TUI + websockets are planned, but not the primary interface yet).
• runelink-client: reusable Rust client library for talking to RuneLink servers.
• runelink-types: shared request/response and host types.

Federation (high level)

RuneLink separates user authentication from server-to-server federation:

• Clients authenticate only with their home host (user sessions are local).
• When a home host needs to interact with a remote host, it uses server-to-server requests authenticated with short-lived JWTs.
• Remote hosts validate those JWTs by discovering public keys via JWKS published at /.well-known/jwks.json.

More detailed federation/authentication documentation is planned.

Authentication (high level)

Authentication is local to your home host. The current server exposes OIDC-style discovery endpoints and a token endpoint supporting:

• password grant (username/password) to get an access token + refresh token
• refresh_token grant to mint new access tokens

This is intentionally not federated: your end-user credentials are never shared with remote hosts.

Getting started (local dev)

Prerequisites

• Rust toolchain (this workspace uses edition 2024). If you don't have Rust installed yet, see rustup.
• Postgres

Build and use the CLI client (rune)

Install rune from source (recommended for now):

cargo install --path runelink-term

Verify it's in your PATH:

rune --help

Typical flow:

# 1) Create an account on your home host (signup policy may change)
rune account create

# 2) Log in (stores tokens locally)
rune account login

# 3) Create a server (workspace/community)
rune server create

# 4) Create a channel
rune channel create

# 5) Send a message
rune message send

Most commands will prompt you for any missing values (host, IDs, message body, etc.) so you can get started quickly. For scripting and non-interactive use, most prompts also have --... flags (run rune --help and rune <command> --help).

Run the server

If you want to host your own RuneLink server, run runelink-server (Axum + Postgres).

runelink-server reads configuration from TOML.

Create your local config from the example:

cp runelink-server/config.example.toml runelink-server/config.toml

Single-server config syntax:

[[servers]]
local_host = "localhost"
port = 7000
database_url = "postgres://postgres:postgres@localhost/runelink"
key_dir = "/home/your-user/.local/share/runelink/keys/localhost/7000"

Then update database_url and any other values for your environment, install sqlx-cli, and run migrations:

runelink-server runtime config comes from TOML, but sqlx tooling (CLI/query checking) reads DATABASE_URL from env/.env. Copy runelink-server/.env.example to runelink-server/.env for local tooling, or pass --database-url to sqlx commands.

cargo install sqlx-cli --no-default-features --features postgres,rustls
sqlx migrate run

Start the server:

cargo run

If your config contains multiple [[servers]] entries, runelink-server will infer cluster mode and start multiple server instances in one process.

You can verify it's up with:

curl "http://localhost:7000/ping"

Roadmap (high level)

• A public/demo instance: planned.
• A richer interactive client experience: CLI today, TUI + GUI with websockets planned.
• Calls: group audio + video calls with WebRTC.
• Direct messages: user-to-user direct messages with E2EE as well as group chats.
• Federation hardening: key rotation, better caching/validation, richer policies.
• Authentication improvements: additional methods remain local to the home host.

Contributing

Useful workspace commands:

cargo check
cargo test
cargo fmt --all
cargo clippy --all-targets -- -D warnings

License

GPL-3.0. See LICENSE.