Nostr-Nym Proxy

Nostr-nym is a proxy for using Nostr through the Nym Mixnet. It stands between Nostr users and a specific Nostr relay, preferrably on the same machine as the relay, allowing users to connect to this relay without leaking their IP address to it.

How to run this?

Parameters

These can be provided by arguments or environement variable. Environment variables have precedence over arguments passed by CLI.

CLI short	CLI long	Env variable	Default value	Description
-l	--log-level	LOG_LEVEL	info	Log level
-c	--nym-client-ws	NYM_CLIENT_WS	127.0.0.1:1977	Address of the nym-client to listen to
-r	--nostr-relay-ws	NOSTR_RELAY_WS	127.0.0.1:1700	Address of the nostr relay to forward messages to
-d	--nym-client-log-level	NYM_CLIENT_LOG_LEVEL	""	Log level of socket connection to Nym mixnet
-s	--nostr-relay-log-level	NOSTR_RELAY_LOG_LEVEL	""	Log level of socket connection to Nostr relay

The log level values that can be used are: trace, debug, info, warn, error (fatal and panic are not used). Leave blank to disable logging.

Hereafter are presented several ways to run this software, depending on your need.

Note that in any case, a running nym-client and Nostr relay are required. You need to have both ready. The docker-compose option include both nym-client and Nostr relay.

Code

# Clone this repository
git clone https://github.com/notrustverify/nostr-nym

# Move inside the freshly downloaded folder
cd nostr-nym

# Run the software
go run .

You can provide parameters as explained above.

Docker

The most straightforward

# Download and run our image. Parameters are provided via env variable (using -e in docker invocation)
docker run --name nostr-nym -e LOG_LEVEL=info notrustverify/nostr-nym

You can see the Client ID of the proxy in the logs.

If you want to include our image in your docker-compose, check our docker-compose.yml file!

Docker Compose

This option will run an instance of the nym-client and a nostr relay, for convenience, in addition to a docker image of this code (fetched from Docker Hub). If you want to build yours locally, instead of using our image, add -f docker-compose.build.yml to the docker compose commands below to use the docker-compose.build.yml file instead.

# Clone this repository
git clone https://github.com/notrustverify/nostr-nym

# Move inside the freshly downloaded folder
cd nostr-nym
cp example.docker-compose.yml docker-compose.yml

# Set the correct rights for docker containers to be allowed to access their volumes
mkdir ./nym-client-data
sudo chown -R 10000:10000 ./nym-client-data

# Build and start containers
docker compose up -d

# The containers can be stopped using, from the same folder
docker compose down

You can see the Client ID of the proxy in the logs.

Note: In the logs, you may notice that a first instance of this software fails to connect to the nym-client. It is due to the fact that the nym-client is not ready yet and so the proxy, which fails, will restart and then connect. Nothing to worry here.

Contribute

If you want to edit this piece of code, we prepared a special docker-compose for you, so that you can work on the code and have the required services running around. We suggest you follow these instructions.

# Clone this repository
git clone https://github.com/notrustverify/nostr-nym

# Move inside the freshly downloaded folder
cd nostr-nym

# Set the correct rights for the nym-client to be allowed to access their volume
sudo chmod -R 10000:10000 ./nym-client-data

# Start the docker-compose for development
docker-compose -f docker-compose.dev.yaml up -d

# You can run the proxy with the following parameters (passed by CLI for example)
go run . --nym-client-ws 127.0.0.1:10977 --nostr-relay-ws 127.0.0.1:7000 --log-level debug

# Or you can use our Makefile for this
make run-debug

# When you want to stop the services stop the docker compose by using, from the same folder
docker-compose -f docker-compose.dev.yaml down

License

This code is released under the GPLv3+ license.