MeshBay

MeshBay is a platform for private, encrypted, self-hosted groups with an application store. A group is a set of people, a set of directories on somebody's machine, and a set of applications over them — chat, files, video, music, photos. Files stay on the machine that shares them and travel encrypted, peer to peer; the hub only introduces machines to each other and never sees a file, a message or a key.

It is not a public file-sharing network. Public groups are an optional hub feature, and they are off on the reference deployment, meshbay.org.

   your machine                        hub                          a member
   ────────────                        ───                          ────────
   meshbay-node  ◄─── signalling ────►  accounts,   ◄─── sign-in ───►  browser
   holds the files                      group list,                   or desktop
   holds the group key                  introductions                 client
        │                                                                │
        └──────────── encrypted, peer to peer, direct ───────────────────┘

Getting started

Using MeshBay: docs/QUICKSTART.md turns one Linux machine into a node and invites a second person; docs/USERGUIDE.md explains every step.
Running your own hub: docs/PACKAGING-GUIDE.md, docs/HTTPS.md and docs/MAIL-SERVER.md.
How it works: docs/MESHBAY_DESIGN.md is the architecture specification, and docs/MESHBAY_NODE_PROTOCOL.md the wire format.

Repository layout

Path	Contents
`packages/meshbay-common/`	Shared cryptography and protocol types
`packages/meshbay-hub/`	Hub server (FastAPI + PostgreSQL) and the web client it serves
`packages/meshbay-node/`	Node daemon, its CLI and its local control UI
`packaging/`	`.deb`, `.rpm` and Windows packaging, systemd units, Caddy and firewall configuration
`docs/`	Design specification, protocol, user and operator guides
`man/`	Manual page for `meshbay-node`
`site/`	Static website pages (not deployed)
`poc/`	Early proof-of-concept scripts, kept for reference

Development

Python 3.12 or later. All dependencies are declared in the packages' pyproject.toml files:

python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e "packages/meshbay-common[dev]" -e "packages/meshbay-hub[dev]" \
            -e "packages/meshbay-node[dev]"
.venv/bin/pytest

Source

The repository is published read-only at https://git.meshbay.org/, and can be cloned with:

git clone https://git.meshbay.org/meshbay.git