How to use webtorrent in Node?

[daver182]

Hi, I'm trying to use webtorrent in Node but I'm getting too many errors, beside that maybe the docs arent too explanatory.

I have this:

require('fs');

var WebTorrent = require('webtorrent');
var client = new WebTorrent();

fs.readFile('data/data1.json', 'utf8', function (err,data) {
    if (err) return console.log(err);

    var buffer = new Buffer(data, "utf-8")
    client.seed(buffer, function(torrent){
        console.log(torrent);
    });
});

I've tried this other way:

fs.createReadStream('data/data1.json', {}).on('data',function(data){
    console.log(data.length);
    client.seed(data, function(torrent){
        console.log(torrent);
    });
});

The errors I get are in the new Torrent call, specifically in torrent.lib line 88:

TypeError: path must be a string

What I'm doing wrong? Is this the good aproach? The file is a JSON type, maybe thats the problem.

Thanks for any help!

[feross]

Hi @daver182, thanks for trying out WebTorrent. What errors are you encountering in node.js? Without seeing the exact errors I can only guess at the problem.

Your first example looks almost correct, except for one issue. In node you need to assign the result of require to a variable:

var fs = require('fs');

Also, it could be simplified like this:

var fs = require('fs');
var WebTorrent = require('webtorrent');

var client = new WebTorrent();

client.seed('data/data1.json', function (torrent) {
  console.log(torrent);
});

You can see what values client.seed takes as input by reading the documentation for client.seed.

Your second example has many more issues. That's not how streams work. I would read the streams handbook and complete the stream-adventure nodeschool workshop to learn how to use streams correctly :)

Feel free to reply if you have additional issues with WebTorrent.