@marianmeres/ws

A WebSocket client with namespaces, rooms, presence and reconnect that actually survives real networks — plus a mountable reference server implementing the same protocol.

Features

• Reconnects forever — capped exponential backoff with jitter, plus instant retry when the browser comes back online or the tab regains focus
• Detects half-open connections — the failure where the peer vanishes, no onclose ever fires, and a naive client sits "connected" receiving nothing
• Namespaces and rooms — namespace isolates, rooms are channels within it
• Presence — opt-in per room; membership snapshot plus join/leave deltas, re-synced automatically after every reconnect
• Buffered sends — publishes issued while offline are queued (capped, never unbounded) and flushed after re-subscribe
• Acknowledged publishes — publish() resolves with a recipient count
• Runs everywhere — WebSocket is a global in browsers, Deno, Node 22+, Bun and Workers, so there is no polyfill and no transport dependency
• Svelte-store compatible reactive connection state

Installation

npm install @marianmeres/ws

deno add jsr:@marianmeres/ws

npm ships the client only. The reference server needs Deno.upgradeWebSocket, so it exists solely as jsr:@marianmeres/ws/server. The client is fully runtime-agnostic, so npm consumers lose nothing they could have used.

ws or sse?

@marianmeres/sse is the sibling package: same shape of API, different transport, different strengths. In short —

• Reach for ws when traffic is genuinely bidirectional and chatty (collaborative editing, games, chat with typing indicators), when you need presence, or when you need binary frames.
• Reach for sse when traffic is mostly server → client (notifications, live dashboards, progress, activity feeds), or when losing messages across a reconnect is not acceptable — SSE resumes from Last-Event-ID, WebSocket has no equivalent.

They are not drop-in replacements for one another and are not meant to be. See COMPARISON.md in the sse package for the full table.

Usage

Client

import { createWSClient } from "@marianmeres/ws";

const ws = createWSClient({
	url: "/ws",
	namespace: "org-123",
	auth: () => session.token, // called on every (re)connect, so refresh works
});

// Subscribe and handle in one call; the returned function detaches the handler
// and unsubscribes the room when it was the last one.
const unsub = await ws.subscribe("chat", (msg) => {
	console.log(msg.from, msg.payload, msg.timestamp);
});

const { recipients } = await ws.publish("chat", { text: "hello" });

unsub();
ws.dispose();

connect() is optional — the first subscribe() or publish() starts the connection. Call it explicitly when you want a readiness gate:

await ws.connect(); // resolves once connected; rejects only if retrying cannot help

Presence

Presence is enabled by providing a presence handler, and is opt-in per room — a room with thousands of subscribers does not want a join event per peer every time the fleet reconnects.

await ws.subscribe("room", onMessage, {
	presence: (e) => {
		// e.event is "sync" | "join" | "leave"
		// "sync" carries the full snapshot, and fires again after every reconnect
		console.log(e.event, e.clientId, e.members);
	},
});

ws.members("room"); // last known membership

Reactive state (Svelte)

<script>
    import { createWSClient } from "@marianmeres/ws";
    const ws = createWSClient({ url: "/ws" });
    const state = ws.state;
</script>

{#if $state.connected}
    <Online />
{:else if $state.attempt > 0}
    <p>Reconnecting… (attempt {$state.attempt})</p>
{/if}

Server

import { createWSApp } from "@marianmeres/ws/server";

const { app, service } = createWSApp("/ws", [], {
	verify: async (payload, req) => {
		const user = await authenticate(payload?.token);
		// Returning null closes the socket with a terminal code.
		return user ? { clientId: user.id, namespace: user.orgId } : null;
	},
});

// Push to connected clients from anywhere in your app.
await service.publish("notifications", { text: "deploy finished" }, "org-123");

Deno.serve(app);

Mounted routes, relative to the mount path:

Method	Path	Notes
GET	/	WebSocket upgrade
GET	/stats	Guarded by httpAuth when supplied
POST	/publish/[namespace]/[room]	Requires httpAuth, else not mounted
POST	/broadcast/[room]	Requires httpAuth, else not mounted

Example

A complete room chat — demino server plus a plain HTML client — lives in example/:

deno task example    # builds the client bundle, then serves on :8000

It exercises the handshake, namespaces, rooms, presence, acknowledged publishes, the broadcast gate, reconnect with buffered sends, HTTP injection and the pub/sub adapter seam. See example/README.md.

Concepts

Namespace — the isolation boundary. Clients in different namespaces can subscribe to identically named rooms without ever seeing each other's messages. A client may only publish into its own namespace.

Room — a channel within a namespace. Subscribe to receive its messages.

Broadcast — the one operation that crosses namespaces. It is a separate method rather than a flag on publish() precisely because crossing an isolation boundary deserves its own name and its own server-side check: allowBroadcast denies by default.

Behaviour worth knowing

Reconnect classification. Everything reconnects except a local disconnect() and an explicit terminal close code (4001 AUTH_FAILED, 4003 FORBIDDEN by default). A server-sent 1000 Normal Closure does reconnect — a graceful shutdown or rolling deploy is exactly when clients must come back.

Terminal failures are loud. Giving up is the only non-retrying exit, so it rejects any pending connect(), emits terminated, and logs at error level. A silent one would be indistinguishable from a network that never recovered.

Delivery is at-most-once. A publish that was transmitted but unacknowledged when the socket died is not resent — that would risk duplicates, and the server has no deduplication. It rejects on sendTimeout. At-least-once would need server-side replay, which this version does not do.

Sends are bounded. Every publish carries one deadline covering queue, flight and acknowledgement. Without it, a publish issued while offline would pend forever behind an infinite retry.

disconnect() is resumable; dispose() is terminal. Handlers, rooms and buffered sends survive a disconnect(), so a later connect() picks up where it left off.

API

See API.md for complete API documentation.

License

MIT