WASTE's design philosophy is still sound: small trusted groups, no central server, encrypted everything, equal nodes. That's essentially what Signal's sealed sender and private groups do today, just without a self-hosted option. This gap is worth filling.
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## Architecture
Two clean layers, connected by the IPC port.
### Daemon
The real application. A long-running background process that handles everything:
Exposes a local JSON API over TCP (`127.0.0.1:17337`). Can run headlessly — SSH into a box and the mesh stays alive even with no UI attached.
### UI Layer
Talks to the daemon over the IPC port. The separation means the UI is replaceable without touching the core.
Target: a web frontend (React or similar) wrapped in a native binary using a Tauri-style approach — native packaging, OS webview, no Electron weight. Avoids the wxWidgets ugliness of the old wxWASTE fork and the Qt licensing headaches of the VIA fork.
A terminal UI (`cmd/tui`) using [Bubble Tea](https://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea). Three-pane layout: rooms, messages, peers. Supports group chat, DMs, room switching, invite generation. Works over SSH.
Solved by using WebRTC DataChannels via pion. ICE gathers host + server-reflexive (STUN) candidates and performs UDP hole punching automatically. The anchor (`cmd/anchor`) doubles as a STUN server on UDP/3478.
**Browser mode:** `iceServers()` in `browser.ts` reads `WASTE_CONFIG.turnURL` and `WASTE_CONFIG.turnSecret`, generates time-limited HMAC-SHA1 credentials (compatible with coturn `use-auth-secret`), and adds the TURN server to the ICE candidate list. The peer dot turns yellow for relayed connections (`candidate_type: relay`).
**Daemon mode:** `-turn-url` and `-turn-secret` flags on `cmd/daemon`. `turnICEServers()` in `internal/netmgr/manager.go` generates HMAC-SHA1 credentials and injects them into the ICE server list for every new peer connection.
Dedicated binary DataChannel per transfer (`f:<xid>`). SHA-256 integrity verification. 64 KiB chunks with backpressure. Auto-accept. In browser mode: both pull (browse peer's shared folder) and push (📎 send directly to a peer).
### Peer Gossip ✅ (shipped)
When a new peer connects, the mesh immediately gossips the full peer list to them (`peer_gossip` wire message). New arrivals discover existing peers without needing the anchor to re-introduce them. The anchor becomes optional once the first handshake has happened — the mesh self-heals around anchor downtime.
Browser mode now auto-rejoins on reload. The last-used network name, alias, and anchor URL are saved to `localStorage` on join and restored on load. A ⏻ logout button in the sidebar clears session state (optionally including the identity keypair) and reloads the page.
Multiple share roots per network, with global (all networks) or scoped visibility.
- **Daemon:** `shares.json` next to `identity.json` in the data dir. `add_share`/`remove_share`/`list_shares` IPC commands. File listing recursively walks all share roots, returning relative paths. Backward compatible with the existing `set_share_dir` single-dir mechanism.
- **Browser:** `waste_shares` in `localStorage` stores named share records (folder name, global flag). The `ShareManager` sidebar component shows the list with re-pick (↺) and remove (✕) buttons. Actual `File` objects live in memory — the record persists across reloads so the user can restore with one click.
**Web UI:** The `+` button in the Rooms sidebar creates custom rooms, stored in `customRooms` keyed by `network_id`. Room names are slugified strings — any peer that sends to a room name causes it to appear on the recipient automatically.
**TUI:** Type `/room <name>` in the input to create a room. The daemon persists it in the `rooms` SQLite table and echoes a `room_created` IPC event back. On reconnect, rooms are restored via `state_snapshot`. Rooms that receive messages while not active show a `*` prefix in the sidebar; the marker clears when you switch to that room.
DM rooms (`dm:<peerId>`) appear automatically in both interfaces when messages arrive.
On daemon start, the download directory is scanned for `.tmp.meta` sidecars and a `resumable_transfers` IPC event is emitted so the UI can show pending transfers with a progress bar.
Web frontend (React, already built) + [Wails v2](https://wails.io) shell for native packaging. Wails is Go-native — no Rust toolchain required. The daemon runs embedded in the same process; the webview connects to the existing WebSocket IPC at `ws://127.0.0.1:17338`. Built in `cmd/app/` via `./build-app.sh`. System tray (Linux/Windows) and OS notifications are implemented. macOS menu-bar tray requires Cocoa main-thread integration — currently a stub.
| 🔜 planned | Link rendering + image preview in messages |
### Push Notifications (planned)
The web UI is already a PWA (installable, has manifest). The missing half is a service worker + Web Push subscription:
1.**Service worker** — intercepts `push` events and shows OS notifications via `showNotification()`.
2.**VAPID key pair** — generated once by the daemon (`-vapid-key` flag); the public key is served to the browser so it can subscribe.
3.**Subscription persistence** — the browser's `PushSubscription` JSON is sent to the daemon over IPC (`register_push` command). The daemon stores it per-network-per-peer.
4.**Daemon relay** — when a `message_received` event fires with no active IPC WebSocket connection, the daemon POSTs a Web Push notification to the stored subscription endpoint.
This keeps the architecture clean: the daemon already runs in the background; it becomes the notification relay. No third-party push server is required for self-hosted setups (coturn already in use for TURN; a lightweight Web Push POST is similar).
