BetweenUs
BetweenUs is a Discord-like communication platform with secure remote desktop access. A single account gets chat, voice/video calls, screen sharing, and permissioned remote control of another machine — across a desktop client today, with web and Android planned in the same backend.
What's in these docs
- Architecture — the microservices, the peer-to-peer media design, why there is no media server, and the Android client.
- System Design — auth, RBAC, events, ingress through Cloudflare Tunnel.
- Database — the Prisma schema, model by model, with an ERD.
- Services — one page per microservice: what it owns, its REST/WebSocket surface, what it never does.
- Deployment — Docker Compose, the release pipeline, CI/CD.
- Security and E2EE — trust boundaries, encryption design, and the gaps that are open on purpose.
- Running Locally — clone to running chat in a few commands.
Core capabilities
- User authentication (JWT + refresh rotation + OAuth)
- Servers, text channels, direct messages
- Voice calls, video calls, screen sharing
- Presence / online status, typing indicators
- Notifications (desktop tray, push via FCM)
- Roles and per-member permission overrides
- Remote desktop access: view, control, clipboard, file transfer
- Remote machine enrollment and per-machine permission grants, with an audit log
Technology at a glance
| Layer | Technology |
|---|---|
| Desktop client | Electron, React, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, Zustand |
| Web client | Same React UI, served by Vite, mounted at the gateway root |
| Android client | Kotlin, Jetpack Compose |
| Backend | Node.js, TypeScript, NestJS microservices |
| Realtime media | WebRTC, peer-to-peer, no SFU |
| Signalling | WebSocket, relayed by NestJS gateways |
| Database | PostgreSQL via Prisma |
| Realtime/cache state | Redis (presence, pub/sub, rate limiting) |
| Object storage | S3-compatible (or local disk in dev) |
| Ingress | Cloudflare Tunnel → Nginx → services |
| Containers | Docker Compose (dev + prod), one Dockerfile with multiple targets |
Everything here is generated and maintained against the actual source in github.com/aiyu-ayaan/BetweenUs — where a page and the code disagree, the code is right and this page is stale; open an issue.