Introduction

rex-iroh is a sidecar service for Rex that allows clients and servers on different machines to interface natively with each other via iroh.

Motivation

Rex already makes it possible for clients to talk to servers on different machines; in fact, that’s kind of the whole point! However, to do so securely you must have everything on a Tailnet, which assumes a lot about the devices you’re going to be using. You may not want to have your laptop or phone on a VPN all the time or constantly be setting up Tailscale auth.

Instead, rex-iroh connects devices over iroh and plugs into Rex at each end through Unix sockets, allowing clients and servers to interoperate without any modification. Connections are e2e encrypted, and only the devices you pair can connect.