Willow

A peer-to-peer Discord replacement built with Rust. No central servers, no accounts, no middlemen. End-to-end encrypted by default.

Features

• Text chat with channels, threads, reactions, pins, and emoji
• End-to-end encryption — ChaCha20-Poly1305 with X25519 key exchange
• Peer-to-peer — libp2p networking with GossipSub, Kademlia, and mDNS
• File sharing — content-addressed chunking, transferred peer-to-peer
• Servers & permissions — roles, fine-grained permissions, invites
• Event-sourced state — deterministic, mergeable, offline-friendly
• Runs everywhere — native desktop (Bevy) and web browser (Leptos/WASM)

Architecture

Leptos Web UI  or  Bevy Desktop UI
        │                │
        └──── Client Library (willow-client) ────┐
                     │                            │
              State Machine              Network Layer
           (willow-state, pure)       (willow-network, libp2p)
                     │                            │
              ┌──────┴──────┐              ┌──────┴──────┐
              │  Channels   │              │   Relay     │
              │  Messaging  │              │   Workers   │
              │  Crypto     │              │  (replay,   │
              │  Files      │              │   storage)  │
              └─────────────┘              └─────────────┘

Crates:

Crate	Purpose
willow-state	Pure event-sourced state machine (zero I/O)
willow-client	UI-agnostic client library
willow-transport	Binary serialization & protocol framing
willow-identity	Ed25519 identity, message signing, profiles
willow-messaging	Chat messages, HLC ordering
willow-crypto	E2E encryption (ChaCha20-Poly1305, X25519)
willow-channel	Servers, channels, roles, permissions
willow-files	Content-addressed file chunking
willow-network	libp2p networking layer (native + WASM)
willow-relay	Relay server bridging TCP and WebSocket peers
willow-web	Leptos web UI
willow-app	Bevy desktop UI

Getting Started

Prerequisites

• Rust (stable)
• just (command runner)
• trunk (for the web UI)
• wasm32-unknown-unknown target: rustup target add wasm32-unknown-unknown

Local Development

Start the full stack with a single command:

just dev

This launches all services:

Service	Address	Description
Relay	localhost:9090 (TCP), localhost:9091 (WS)	Bridges peers
Replay node	connects via relay	In-memory state sync (max 1000 events/server)
Storage node	connects via relay	Archival SQLite storage
Web UI	http://localhost:8080	Leptos app via trunk serve

All service logs are color-coded and interleaved in the terminal. Press Ctrl+C to stop everything.

Identity keys and data persist in .dev/ so peer IDs stay stable across restarts. After the first run, use just dev-quick to skip the build step.

just dev-quick   # skip build, start immediately
just dev-clean   # reset all local dev data

Running Individual Services

just relay          # relay server only
just serve-web      # web UI only (trunk serve)
just run            # native desktop app

Docker

just docker-build   # build all images
just docker-up      # start full stack
just docker-down    # stop full stack
just docker-logs    # tail all logs

Testing

Willow has 420+ tests across multiple tiers:

just check          # fmt + clippy + test + WASM check (run before committing)
just test           # all cargo tests
just test-state     # pure state machine (64 tests, instant)
just test-client    # client library (93 tests)
just test-app       # Bevy headless + network integration (113 tests)
just test-relay     # relay history sync (3 tests)
just test-scale     # scaling/performance tests
just test-browser   # in-browser Leptos tests (requires Firefox + geckodriver)

License

See LICENSE for details.