Libp2p as reverse proxy for IoT devices about go-libp2p-examples

[hsanjuan]

That example shows how to tunnel something like http using a libp2p stream.

If every IOT device is going to connect to a server using libp2p, then great, that connection can be used to talk http to each IOT device transported on a libp2p stream.

For that each IOT device should run a webserver that, just as it listens on a normal network address (with a Go tcp listener), should listen on the libp2p stream. The example implements the own server, and it may not be clear for real usage.

Instead, I suggest you look into https://github.com/libp2p/go-libp2p-http and https://godoc.org/github.com/libp2p/go-libp2p-http which shows how the Go webserver can "listen on libp2p", and how a Go http client than use libp2p as transport.

Now, in order to access those websites from your browser at the "Server", you will need to additionally run an actual proxy, that takes your browser client requests and tunnels them (the example covers this part I think):

<webserver><libp2p-gostream-listener>-----libp2p-stream-on-libp2p-connection----<libp2p-reverse-proxy-with-go-libp2p-http><browser>

If your webserver is not written in Go, you will need an additional libp2p-reverse-proxy in front of it.

As a side note, go-ipfs has "stream mounting" (ipfs p2p --help) which does exactly the reverse proxy part for the client. i.e. ipfs p2p forward --allow-custom-protocol /libp2p-http :3000 <peerID> will tunnel anything talking to localhost:3000 as a libp2p stream to a given peerID.

[StefanGies99]

@hsanjuan Thanks for your explanation! In the next days, I'll continue working on the mentioned solution above.