coturn VS peerjs

You're welcome! If this is for mission-critical or commercial use, you will want to invest in a good TURN server to ensure a reliable connection between peers. You can either self-host your own Coturn server or pay for a service like Twilio. But if this is just a hobby project, you can just use the free Open Relay Project.

NetBird and Netmaker are similar in their capabilities and mesh offering, the same goes for Tailscale, but if we compare technical implementations, Netbird relies on the ICE and STUN protocols to discover the best path for p2p connectivity between peers. These are open WebRTC protocols with battle-tested software around them. Similarly, we use TURN for securely relaying traffic, when a p2p connection isn't possible (hard NAT). This protocol also comes from the WebRTC world and has stable and popular implementations like Coturn.

There are several options available both self-hosted and cloud provided services. A self-hosted option is to use the open source COTURN project and running it for example on an EC2 instance on AWS. The quickest way to get this up and running is to spin up an EC2 instance (ubuntu) running a Docker engine. To install Docker engine:

What does this do better than coturn (https://github.com/coturn/coturn)?

Audio/video calls is a matter of setting up a TURN server (either coturn or eturnal are typically used) and then putting the info in the Prosody config so it can inform clients. There is a short guide on setting up coturn for Prosody and eturnal shouldn't be too different.

Wiretrustee uses TURN to relay traffic in case a direct peer-to-peer connection isn't possible (happens with carrier-grade NATs).

Basically yes. The difference would be that we are trying to use more open source technologies and libraries instead of implementing our own. For example pion/ice from the WebRTC project and coturn for STUN and TURN. Both ice and coturn are used to go around NAT. We lack a peer management system that will allow to add peers dynamically. Tailscale and Zero tier have it but not open sourced. We plan to implement such a system and open source it.

Coturn as TURN relay server

You might be able to eliminate the VPS by making it P2P using something like PeerJS [1]. PeerJS provides a free shared connection broker server.

[1]: https://peerjs.com/

We use peer.js module to create a WebRTC connection between clients

Now that we have all the required boilerplate we can start building the actual game. For the communications between peers we are going to use PeerJS a peer-to-peer library built on top of WebRTC.

I am using https://peerjs.com/. I am currently using their default brokering system (which is the default out-of-the-box). it seems (when necessary) i am able to run my own version as provided at: https://github.com/peers/peerjs-server

Without backend, you can choose WebRTC for all communication b/w players. peerjs is a good library for that. However, I would still suggest not to take this approach as it can be overwhelming.

Peerjs library for webRTC

Check out https://peerjs.com/. It's a good library, especially for one-on-one calls. It's P2P. When you start adding more users, it does tend to cause some performance issues, but it works well for smaller projects.

Fun fact about PeerJS, you'll need a server in order to use it (look into STUN/TURN/ICE for more info). The maintainer seems to be hosting one default instance that goes down from time to time. https://github.com/peers/peerjs/issues/671 https://github.com/peers/peerjs/issues/693

If you're looking to do "pure" P2P in the browser, we're not there yet as we cannot accept incoming connections without something in between right now.