Configuration

Default listening port

The Nym native client exposes a websocket interface that your code connects to. To program your app, choose a websocket library for whatever language you're using. The default websocket port is 1977, you can override that in the client config if you want.

You can either set this via the --port flag at init or run, or you can manually edit ~/.nym/clients/<CLIENT-ID>/config/config.toml.

Remember to restart your client if you change your listening port via editing your config file.

Choosing a Gateway

By default your client will choose a random gateway to connect to.

However, there are several options for choosing a gateway, if you do not want one that is randomly assigned to your client:

If you wish to connect to a specific gateway, you can specify this with the --gateway flag when running init.
You can also choose a gateway based on its location relative to your client. This can be done by appending the --latency-based-routing flag to your init command. This command means that to select a gateway, your client will:
- fetch a list of all available gateways
- send few ping messages to all of them, and measure response times.
- create a weighted distribution to randomly choose one, favouring ones with lower latency.

Note this doesn't mean that your client will pick the closest gateway to you, but it will be far more likely to connect to gateway with a 20ms ping rather than 200ms

Configuring your client

When you initalise a client instance, a configuration directory will be generated and stored in $HOME_DIR/.nym/clients/<client-name>/.

tree $HOME/<user>/.nym/clients/example-client
├── config
│   └── config.toml
└── data
    ├── ack_key.pem
    ├── gateway_shared.pem
    ├── private_encryption.pem
    ├── private_identity.pem
    ├── public_encryption.pem
    └── public_identity.pem

The config.toml file contains client configuration options, while the two pem files contain client key information.

The generated files contain the client name, public/private keypairs, and gateway address. The name <client_id> in the example above is just a local identifier so that you can name your clients.

Configuring your client for Docker

By default, the native client listens to host 127.0.0.1. However this can be an issue if you wish to run a client in a Dockerized environment, where it can be convenenient to listen on a different host such as 0.0.0.0.

You can set this via the --host flag during either the init or run commands.

Alternatively, a custom host can be set in the config.toml file under the socket section. If you do this, remember to restart your client process.

Commands Examples