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VoicePing Router

A real-time push-to-talk server to route and broadcast voice messaging. The server is using NodeJS with native websocket, and also using Redis as temporary storage.

You may want to try first to connect the VoicePing demo SDK app or your app that uses VoicePing Android SDK to wss://router-lite.voiceping.info. This is to make sure it can successfully communicate before you try to self-host your own VoicePing router server. If communication with our hosted server is successful, then you can replace it with the self-hosted server URL. Look more at below guide and the server repository for details.

Running the service​

Requirements​

In order to run the server, you need to have at least:

  • Ubuntu 18.04
  • NodeJS 8.16.0 (this needs to be exact, higher nodejs/npm will probably cuase installation and run issue)
  • Redis
  • Docker (optional if you want run in docker)

Clone the server repo​

You can clone the server repository from https://github.com/SmartWalkieOrg/voiceping-router.

$ git clone https://github.com/SmartWalkieOrg/voiceping-router
$ cd voiceping-router

Environment variables​

Below are the required environment variables that need to be set before running the server.

Server related:

  • PORT (int): The port number the server will listen to. Default: 3000.
  • USE_AUTHENTICATION (boolean): The configuration whether you want to use JWT authentication or not. Default: false
  • SECRET_KEY (string): JWT secret key. This is required when USE_AUTHENTICATION is set true.

Database related:

  • REDIS_HOST (string): Redis host. Default: localhost.
  • REDIS_PORT (string): Redis host. Default: 6379.
  • REDIS_PASSWORD (string): Redis host. Default: localhost.

Run the server​

Production​

Install dependencies with npm and start

$ npm install
$ npm run build
$ npm run start

The server should be running on wss://localhost:3000 by default. You can check in browser using http://<your-ip-or-hostname> it should be showing something like this:

Welcome to VoicePing Router 2.3.3-LITE

Development​

Start development server with nodemon. It will automatically watch file changes, lint it and restart the server.

$ npm run start:dev

Test​

Unit Test​

Run test with npm

$ npm test

Manual Test​

To run properly, voiceping-router needs to run together with redis (by default on port 6379). So you need to run redis on OS port 6379. Easiest with docker: docker run -p 6379:6379 -d redis

In order to test whether this router server is running correctly. You need to use it from Android SDK. We also provide a simple web page for you to test: https://voiceping-router-test.netlify.app. Input any company name and user ID. Router URL input will be something like ws://localhost:3000 or ws://127.0.0.1:3000 depends on your own IP and port setting.

Running in Docker​

The easiest way to run voiceping-server using a single command is by using docker-compose. Simply run the command below

$ docker-compose up -d

Same as above. When you access http://<your-ip-or-hostname> from your browser, you should see:

Welcome to VoicePing Router 2.3.3-LITE

Self-hosted VoicePing Router​

If you choose to self-host the VoicePing Router, you will need to update the server URL on your app that uses the VoicePing Android SDK to your new self-hosted domain or IP address.

User Authentication​

By default, this server doesn't use any authentication. But you can enable authentication by setting thru environment variables. Below are the environment variables that you need to set:

  • USE_AUTHENTICATION
  • SECRET_KEY

Once you set that, the server will require JWT authentication in order to receive connection from client.

Encode JWT in Your Client / Server​

Instead of using user_id to connect to voiceping-router server. You need to decode the whole user information to JWT token. You can do this either in your client or in your own server.

Example in Javascript

var jwt = require('jsonwebtoken');
var SECRET_KEY = 'something';

var user = {
  user_id: 1,
  name: 'John'
}
var token = jwt.sign(user, SECRET_KEY);

Connect to VoicePing Router Using Encoded Token​

Once you get the encode the user information into JWT. You can connect to voiceping-router using that token.

Example using Javascript:

var WebSocket = require("ws");

var connection = new WebSocket(WS_URL, [VoicePingToken, DeviceId]);

connection.on("open", () => {
  console.log("connection.on.open");
});

On VoicePing SDK demo apk, the token is simply concatenation of company name and user id. Something like: ${companyName}_${userId}