RelayFabric¶

RelayFabric is an open communications routing fabric for interconnecting otherwise incompatible messaging, mesh, radio, and Internet systems. It provides one common routing, policy, identity, security, and message-processing layer, and delegates every protocol-specific detail to plugins. Bridge a Meshtastic LoRa mesh to Reticulum/LXMF, relay Signal into Nostr, or federate two gateways over an untrusted link, through a single headless daemon.

Feature status¶

Per-plugin interop coverage (inbound/outbound/replies/attachments/reconnect/dedup/offline/restart/payload/failure-injection) lives in the Interoperability Matrix.

The idea¶

Every messaging network speaks its own protocol, carries its own identity model, and makes its own trust assumptions. RelayFabric refuses to reinvent any of them. Instead it routes messages, not identities, across a boundary you control:

flowchart TB
  subgraph Networks
    direction LR
    R[Reticulum / LXMF]
    S[Signal]
    M[Meshtastic]
    N[Nostr]
  end
  subgraph Plugins["Plugin processes"]
    direction LR
    PR[lxmf plugin]
    PS[signal plugin]
    PM[meshtastic plugin]
    PN[nostr plugin]
  end
  R <--> PR
  S <--> PS
  M <--> PM
  N <--> PN
  PR & PS & PM & PN <-->|CBOR IPC| D[("switchyardd<br/>routing · policy · identity · security · queue")]
  D <-->|Noise + attestation| F[peer gateway]

Plugins are separate, supervised processes that speak a small CBOR-over-Unix-socket protocol to the daemon. The daemon owns routing, deduplication, hop limits, store-and-forward queuing, identity pseudonymization, and the security envelope. A plugin crash never takes the fabric down.

What it does¶

Components¶

• switchyardd, the core daemon: routing, deduplication, policy enforcement, persistence, and an admin API, all headless.
• switchyardctl: a CLI client for the admin API (status, plugins, routes, queue, trace, config, events).
• Plugins: one supervised process per protocol, speaking CBOR over a Unix socket.

Get started¶

cargo build -j2 --release          # binaries in target/release/
switchyardd --config docs/relayfabric.example.yaml --check-config

Then follow Getting Started for a full end-to-end route, or jump to the Configuration reference.