A drop-in replacement of ssb-keys, implemented in Rust and delivered as a native module in Node.js

npm install ssb-keys-neon

It would make a lot of sense for SSB to be implemented in Rust, a language for safety and performance. Sunrise Choir has written a lot of SSB modules in Rust, but these are not yet running in production, simply because it requires a lot of work to migrate from Node.js (and/or Electron) to Rust.

Neon allows you to create native modules for Node.js written in Rust. This is great, because it allows us to use Sunrise Choir's modules directly inside Node.js!

ssb-keys-neon does exactly that, it runs ssb-crypto, ssb-keyfile, ssb-multiformats (Rust crates) under the hood, but provides an API that perfectly mirrors that of ssb-keys. There is no code you need to migrate, just replace ssb-keys with ssb-keys-neon and it's done.

We even run the same test suite for ssb-keys on ssb-keys-neon.

There are two ways you can use this npm package.

In your package.json, assuming you already have ssb-keys, you can replace its implementation by pointing to the GitHub repo for ssb-keys-neon:

   // ...
   "dependencies": {
     "ssb-ebt": "^5.6.7",
     "ssb-friends": "^4.1.4",
     "ssb-invite": "^2.1.3",
-    "ssb-keys": "7.2.0",
+    "ssb-keys": "staltz/ssb-keys-neon#replace-7.2.0",
     "ssb-lan": "^0.2.0",
     "ssb-logging": "^1.0.0",
     "ssb-markdown": "^6.0.4",
   }
   // ...

This is the easiest method because you only need to change package.json, your code can still require('ssb-keys') and under the hood it will load ssb-keys-neon.

Note that you cannot specify version ranges. If you previously had "ssb-keys": "7.x.x", you will have to specify an exact version when you write "staltz/ssb-keys-neon#replace-7.2.0", you cannot write "staltz/ssb-keys-neon#replace-7.x.x".

This method gives you more control over the usage of ssb-keys-neon, as well as allows you to specify version ranges. Just remove ssb-keys from your package.json, and add ssb-keys-neon:

   // ...
   "dependencies": {
     "ssb-ebt": "^5.6.7",
     "ssb-friends": "^4.1.4",
     "ssb-invite": "^2.1.3",
-    "ssb-keys": "8.0.0",
+    "ssb-keys-neon": ">=8.0.0-1",
     "ssb-lan": "^0.2.0",
     "ssb-logging": "^1.0.0",
     "ssb-markdown": "^6.0.4",
   }
   // ...

Then, you also have to replace usages of ssb-keys manually in JavaScript source files:

-var ssbKeys = require('ssb-keys')
+var ssbKeys = require('ssb-keys-neon')

 // ...

[email protected] is compatible with [email protected]. Versions older than 8.0.0 still use the old name ssb-neon-keys so be sure to type it correctly.

Versions of ssb-keys that are mirrored by ssb-keys-neon currently include (and which platforms are guaranteed to be supported):

LGPL-3.0