Simple peer-to-peer file transfer protocol inspired by the BitTorrent protocol, but instead of custom TCP protocols everything is built on top of QUIC (and therefore can be protected by TLS easily).

How does it work?

There are three types of actors in a functioning coyote environment. First of all, there are the taverns. These are rendevouz servers, which introduce network peers to each other. The first type of peer is the seeder. They provide their bandwidth and storage for others to use and download file chunks from. Then there is the fetcher. Its sole purpose is to contact taverns, ask around for peers for a given file hash and contact these seeders, fetching file chunks and assembling the final file at the end.

What does (not) work yet?

• Simple file sharing using tavern, fetcher and seeder
• Announcement timeouts
• Better chunk download scheduling
• Add support to resume fetches by checking for already downloaded chunks (and verifying them)
• Use UDP-based QUIC as transport layer with Buf Connect on top of it (with this comes UDP hole punching)
• Encryption of tavern traffic using Let's Encrypt certificates
• Use distributed hash tables for decentralized peer discovery
• Split .tracker into public- and private trackers, allowing for file encryption
• Add tests for fetcher, seeder, tavern and tracker

Installation

go install github.com/lnsp/coyote@latest

The binary is then available in your $GOPATH/bin directory.

Usage

# First, we need to setup a tracker for our file.
# We assume, that the file you want to distribute is called myvideo.mp4
coyote track -s https://tavern.espe.tech:6443 myvideo.mp4
# Now you get a myvideo.mp4.coyote file which you can share with others
# To seed the file yourself, use the seed command
coyote seed -x