ringdrop 0.16.0

Ringdrop is a secure, frugal streamed P2P file transfer tool, with ring-based access control, built on iroh-blobs and iroh-rings.

To share a file, associate it with one or more rings and get back an rdrop:// ticket to hand to peers. Only peers who are members of those rings can download it. Transfers resume automatically if interrupted — no verified data is re-transferred after a crash or disconnect.

Access control is enforced at the connection level. Ring–resource associations carry typed permissions (Read, Write, Delete). When a peer requests to download a blob, the sender checks that the peer holds Read permission on it — either through ring membership or the built-in open ring — and denies the transfer before any data is sent if not.

Features

• Ring-based access control — share with specific peers or groups via private rings, or open to everyone
• Crash-safe resumption — BLAKE3 bitfield tracks verified chunks; interrupted downloads pick up where they left off
• Verified streaming — every 16 KiB chunk is verified against the BLAKE3 hash tree before being written to disk
• Directory support — import and share entire directories as a single ticket

Commands

Here below the available CLI commands; full flag reference in docs/cli.md.

Install

The crate's name is ringdrop; the CLI binary is rdrop, more succinct to type in the command line.

For prerequisites, alternative install methods, and troubleshooting see docs/install.md.

Desktop GUI

ringdrop-gui is the native desktop app (based on tauri v2) connecting to the same daemon as the CLI — the rdrop CLI and the GUI are both IPC clients, fully interchangeable.

Custom relay

By default ringdrop uses the public relay infrastructure provided by Number 0 (relay.iroh.network). You can point the node to a relay you control by adding a relay_url field to config.json (located in your data directory, ~/.local/share/ringdrop/ by default):

{
  "relay_url": "https://relay.yourdomain.com"
}

When the field is absent the default n0 relay is used. An invalid URL or an unreachable relay causes the daemon to fail at startup with a clear error rather than silently falling back.

Self-hosting a relay: see the iroh-relay README for instructions on running your own relay instance. Peer discovery (pkarr/DNS) continues to use n0's iroh.link infrastructure regardless of which relay you choose.

Contributing

If you have ideas/contributions or anything is not working the way you expect (in which case, please include an output with RUST_LOG=debug) and feel free to open an issue or PR.

After cloning, activate the pre-commit hooks (it runs cargo fmt --check and cargo clippy before every commit, and tag verifications before every push):

git config core.hooksPath .githooks

Wire protocols

Notable dependencies

ringdrop is built on:

License

MIT — see LICENSE.