Dumb Pipe

Connect A to B. Send Data.

In 2023 it's hard to connect two devices directly. Dumb pipe punches through NATs, using on-the-fly node identifiers. It even keeps your machines connected as network conditions change.

What you actually do with that connection is up to you.

A unix pipe between computers

Add dumbpipe to your machine using bash:

$ curl -sL https://www.dumbpipe.dev/install.sh | sh

On windows with PowerShell:

$ iwr https://www.dumbpipe.dev/install.ps1 -useb | iex

Get dumbpipe with a single command on two computers, connect them & pipe data from one machine to the other. No accounts. No configuration.

Alternatively, you can install it with Cargo:

cargo install dumbpipe

Or Homebrew:

brew install dumbpipe

Receiver


$ ./dumbpipe listen
using secret key 23ryys7pgvjrr57pcrvyivdrhvqyykg2tv3leou5grm66xfd7zzq
Listening. To connect, use:
./dumbpipe connect nodeecsxraxjtqtneathgplh6d5nb2rsnxpfulmkec2rvhwv3hh6m4rdgaibamaeqwjaegplgayaycueiom6wmbqcjqaibavg5hiaaaaaaaaaaabaau7wmbq

Sender


echo "hello" | ./dumbpipe connect nodeecsxraxjtqtneathgplh6d5nb2rsnxpfulmkec2rvhwv3hh6m4rdgaibamaeqwjaegplgayaycueiom6wmbqcjqaibavg5hiaaaaaaaaaaabaau7wmbq

This will work, regardless of where the two machines are. Dumb pipe finds a way.

Put a dumb pipe in your app

Dumb pipes are Iroh Connections. The dumbpipe tool is a 200-line wrapper around the iroh rust crate. You can use the iroh Endpoint to create a connection to use as a dumb pipe in your own app.

QUIC & Dumb

These dumb pipes use QUIC over a magic socket. It may be dumb, but it still has all the features of a full QUIC connection: UDP-based, stream-multiplexing and encrypted. Besides using the multiplexed streams you can also use multiple connections each with their own ALPN.

Sometimes you gotta relay

For somewhere around 10-20% of connections, it's simply not possible to connect two devices directly. For those cases, we use a meshed network of relay nodes to pack up UDP traffic & send it over HTTP. Sounds silly, but it works. And the magic socket handles all this under the hood.

Your own Network

The team behind number0 runs the default relay network, which has a capped bandwidth. High-throughput, authenticated relays are now available through n0des!

Need more?

Need pubsub? Data transfer? Sync? All of these are opt-in addons from iroh. But if you add these things, the pipe is no longer dumb. You decide how to feel about that.

Need to connect two devices? Try a

dumb pipe