The I2P interface lets you connect Reticulum instances over the Invisible Internet Protocol. This can be especially useful in cases where you want to host a globally reachable Reticulum instance, but do not have access to any public IP addresses, have a frequently changing IP address, or have firewalls blocking inbound traffic.

Using the I2P interface, you will get a globally reachable, portable and persistent I2P address that your Reticulum instance can be reached at.

To use the I2P interface, you must have an I2P router running on your system. The easiest way to acheive this is to download and install the latest release of the i2pd package. For more details about I2P, see the geti2p.net website.

When an I2P router is running on your system, you can simply add an I2P interface to reticulum:

[[I2P]]

type = I2PInterface

interface_enabled = yes

connectable = yes

On the first start, Reticulum will generate a new I2P address for the interface and start listening for inbound traffic on it. This can take a while the first time, especially if your I2P router was also just started, and is not yet well-connected to the I2P network. When ready, you should see I2P base32 address printed to your log file. You can also inspect the status of the interface using the rnstatus utility.

To connect to other Reticulum instances over I2P, just add a comma-separated list of I2P base32 addresses to the peers option of the interface:

[[I2P]]

type = I2PInterface

interface_enabled = yes

connectable = yes

peers = 5urvjicpzi7q3ybztsef4i5ow2aq4soktfj7zedz53s47r54jnqq.b32.i2p

It can take anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes to establish I2P connections to the desired peers, so Reticulum handles the process in the background, and will output relevant events to the log.

Please Note! While the I2P interface is the simplest way to use Reticulum over I2P, it is also possible to tunnel the TCP server and client interfaces over I2P manually. This can be useful in situations where more control is needed, but requires manual tunnel setup through the I2P daemon configuration.

It is important to note that the two methods are interchangably compatible. You can use the I2PInterface to connect to a TCPServerInterface that was manually tunneled over I2P, for example. This offers a high degree of flexibility in network setup, while retaining ease of use in simpler use-cases.

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