5. Routers

Most apps will use more than one protocol. A router let’s you stack protocols on top of iroh's peer-to-peer connections. Routers handle the accept side of an iroh endpoint, but the connection initiation side is still handled by the protocol instance itself.

Since we've already set up a router when adding iroh blobs, we can add another protocol to the router with a few lines of code. Let's add iroh gossip, first by installing the dependency:

cargo add iroh-gossip

Then we can setup gossip & add it to our router:

use iroh::{protocol::Router, Endpoint};
use iroh_blobs::{store::mem::MemStore, BlobsProtocol};
use iroh_gossip::Gossip;

#[tokio::main]
async fn main() -> anyhow::Result<()> {
    let endpoint = Endpoint::bind().await?;
    let store = MemStore::new();
    let blobs = BlobsProtocol::new(&store,None);
    
    let gossip = Gossip::builder().spawn(endpoint.clone());
    
    
    //build the router
    let router = Router::builder(endpoint)
        .accept(iroh_blobs::ALPN, blobs)
        .accept(iroh_gossip::ALPN, gossip)
        .spawn();
    
    router.shutdown().await?;
    
    Ok(())
}

The amount of code is small, but the conceptual shift is a nice-to-have, wrapping an endpoint in a router makes the design intent of iroh clear: set up an endpoint, pull in protocols, feed them to the router, and bind your way to glory.

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