Discovery Relay

Optimized Nostr relay to help Nostr scale globally

Built in .NET for high performance, with ahead-of-time compilation, pre-defined types (not using Reflection). Utilizes LMDB for extreme performance. Key-Value storage with single table, avoiding supporting indexes. Supports only kind 3 and kind 10002, which is what Nostr clients should rely upon for discovery.

Discovery Relays

Learn more: https://medium.com/@sondreb/discovery-relays-e2b0bd00feec

Also check out: https://medium.com/@sondreb/scaling-nostr-e50276774367

Features

• High performance
• Low memory usage
• Supports only kind 3 and kind 10002 (discovery)
• Multiple storage providers:
  • LMDB for key-value storage (default)
  • Azure Blob Storage for cloud deployments

If there is already an kind 10002 event for the same pubkey, the relay will not store an incoming kind 3 event.

Configuration

Storage Providers

The relay supports multiple storage providers that can be configured in the appsettings.json file:

"Storage": {
  "Provider": "Lmdb", // Use "Lmdb" or "AzureBlob"
  "ApiAuthenticationGuid": "00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000"
}

LMDB Storage (Default)

LMDB is a high-performance embedded key-value store, which is the default storage provider:

"Lmdb": {
  "DatabasePath": "./data",
  "SizeInMb": 1024,
  "MaxReaders": 4096,
  "StatsIntervalSeconds": 10,
  "ApiAuthenticationGuid": "00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000"
}

Azure Blob Storage

For cloud deployments, you can use Azure Blob Storage:

"AzureBlob": {
  "ConnectionString": "DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;AccountName=yourstorageaccount;AccountKey=yourstoragekey;EndpointSuffix=core.windows.net",
  "ContainerName": "nostr-events",
  "StatsIntervalSeconds": 10,
  "UseManagedIdentity": false,
  "AccountName": "",
  "EndpointSuffix": "core.windows.net"
}

You can authenticate to Azure Blob Storage in two ways:

1. Connection String: Set the ConnectionString to your Azure Storage account connection string.

2. Managed Identity (recommended for Azure deployments): For higher security, use Azure Managed Identity by setting:

"AzureBlob": {
  "ConnectionString": "",
  "ContainerName": "nostr-events",
  "StatsIntervalSeconds": 10,
  "UseManagedIdentity": true,
  "AccountName": "yourstorageaccount",
  "EndpointSuffix": "core.windows.net"
}

When using Managed Identity, make sure your Azure service (App Service, Azure Functions, VM, etc.) has been assigned a Managed Identity with proper permissions to access the storage account.

The container will be automatically created if it doesn't exist.

To run local blob storage:

npm install -g azurite
azurite

Kudos

While mostly developed with LLM and own code, some inspiration and copy-paste (like error messages) was done from Netstr.