rdrp

rdrp

A cross-platform command line tool for sending and receiving files over your local network, inspired by AirDrop.

• Demo
• Design
• Installation
• Usage
• Contribute

Demo

Try to watch them together, note that the sender does not start the transfer until receiving the "Y".

Design

rdrp uses Multicast DNS to enable peer-to-peer discovery between clients. This means that rdrp will likely not work in most cloud/virtual environments.

When a client first connects, they're registered as a new instance on the _rdrp._tcp service. Each sender continuously browses this service for newly connected broadcasters with whom they'll establish a connection and attempt to send their respective file.

This program implements mDNS with grandcat/zeroconf.

Read more about mDNS: RFC 6762 and DNS-SD: RFC 6763.

Installation / setup

• Go should be installed and configured.

• Install with Go:

  $ go get -v github.com/kshvmdn/rdrp...
  $ which rdrp
  $GOPATH/bin/rdrp
  

• Or, install directly via source:

  $ git clone https://github.com/kshvmdn/rdrp.git $GOPATH/src/github.com/kshvmdn/rdrp
  $ cd $_ # $GOPATH/src/github.com/kshvmdn/rdrp
  $ make install && make
  $ ./rdrp
  

Usage

• There's two parties involved in a single transaction: the sender and the receiver.

• To broadcast yourself as a receiver (i.e. someone receiving a file), use the broadcast command. You'll be listening for incoming send requests. Upon a new connection, you'll be prompted on whether you'd like to accept the file or not, just like AirDrop. The incoming file is copied to stdout.

  $ rdrp broadcast -help
  Usage of broadcast:
    -name string
        Display name
  $ # EXAMPLE:
  $ rdrp broadcast -name broadcaster > ~/Desktop/file.md
  

• To send a file over your local network, use the send command. To specify the file, use the -file flag. Every broadcaster will receive a request to transfer the file. This process continues until aborted (Ctrl+C).

  $ rdrp send -help
  Usage of send:
    -file string
        File to transfer
    -name string
        Display name
  $ # EXAMPLE:
  $ rdrp send -name sender -file README.md
  

• Note that the name flag is optional for both, if not provided, a name is chosen randomly (which is what happened in the demos above).

Contribute

This project is completely open source, feel free to open an issue for questions/features/bugs or submit a pull request.

TODO

• Add an option for senders to provide a list of names to send the file to (right now, when a file is sent, all connected clients get the prompt).
• Add a -list flag to list all currently connected peers (this'll help with the previous TODO I think).
• Check that the registration name is not already being used.
• Add an option to send files via stdin. That way it'll be possible to do something like gzip a folder and directly pipe that into rdrp (instead of doing the two separately).
• Test. This is only tested on macOS right now, would be great if there was some confirmation that it works on Linux as well (and I guess Windows too).