---
title: "aadhar.sh/garage/iroh"
description: "iroh hit 1.0: dial a machine by its public key rather than its IP. A garage look at the P2P library, a native in-browser NodeId generator you can run, and an honest verdict on why a megabyte of wasm does not ride a lean static site."
path: "/garage/iroh"
section: "garage"
kind: "content"
updated: "2026-06-15"
source: "https://aadhar.sh/garage/iroh"
---

> Site index: https://aadhar.sh/llms.txt
> Section index: https://aadhar.sh/garage/llms.txt
> This is the Markdown twin of a page on aadhar.sh. The HTML at the source
> URL below is the original, and is hand-written and unminified on purpose.

# Dial by key

[iroh](https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh) hit 1.0. It is a networking library where you reach another machine by its public key rather than its IP address: a 32-byte ed25519 identity that stays put while the network under it changes, with QUIC hole-punching for a direct encrypted link and a relay only as a fallback. I went looking for a way to use it here. This is where I landed, plus a small piece of it you can run right now.

## The core idea, natively

An iroh `NodeId` is just an ed25519 public key, printed in base32. You do not dial `203.0.113.7`; you dial the key, and iroh finds a path to it. The browser can mint that identity with no library at all, and "no library at all" means three calls:

```
const kp = await crypto.subtle.generateKey(
  { name: "Ed25519" }, true, ["sign", "verify"]);
const pub = new Uint8Array(
  await crypto.subtle.exportKey("raw", kp.publicKey));
const nodeId = base32(pub);   // this string is the address
```

Press the button to run it. Everything the real handler adds around those three lines is a different concern: a `try`/`catch` that falls back to 32 random bytes where the browser has no ed25519, which is why the label under the button tells you which of the two you got, and four DOM writes to put the result on screen. Neither one is about identity.

NodeId · base32 · what iroh dials

the same key, in hex

**That string is the address.** A real iroh ticket wraps this NodeId with a relay URL and any known direct addresses, postcard-serialized, so a peer can start dialing before discovery even finishes. Nothing left your machine to make this.

## Can it live on this site?

Short version: not without weighing the place down, so it does not. The honest reasons:

- **It needs a build this site does not have.** There is no drop-in browser package for iroh. You write a small Rust wrapper crate and compile it with `wasm-bindgen` (the `wasm32-unknown-unknown` target, then a release build whose stated job is to *shrink the wasm*). aadhar.sh has no build step on purpose. Every page is hand-written and inlined.
- **The payload is a megabyte-class wasm blob.** The whole bet here is the opposite: pages around 20KB brotli, zero font bytes, nothing loaded that the page does not use. A multi-MB binary, even lazy-loaded on one page, is the wrong shape for it.
- **It wants infrastructure the edge cannot host.** Browser endpoints cannot hole-punch on their own, so they lean on a relay. Cloudflare Workers are request-and-response with no long-lived QUIC socket, so the site cannot be its own relay. You would borrow iroh's public one or stand up a box elsewhere.
- **There is no second peer.** A personal homepage is one-to-many: you read it, the photos come from a CDN, which is exactly what a CDN is for. P2P shines when two devices talk to each other, not when a thousand readers fetch the same gallery.

So iroh stays a library I admire from across the room. It is the right tool the day this becomes something genuinely peer-to-peer (a "beam this photo straight to your phone, no server in the middle" trick, or a private channel between two of my own machines) and the wrong tool for a lean content site. The garage rule holds: an experiment that would make every *other* page heavier does not get to ship. This page is plain HTML and a few lines of native crypto. It loads nothing iroh, and it changed nothing about how the rest of the site is served.

[← back to the garage](https://aadhar.sh/garage)

Source: https://aadhar.sh/garage/iroh