styrened

Legacy Python daemon notice: styrened was Styrene's first foray into Reticulum and LXMF. Some of it was exploratory, vibe-coded prototype work that should have been retired the moment it became clear the approach was not a sound foundation. It was not retired quickly enough. In particular, legacy Meshtastic/MQTT bridge behavior was left in a dangerous state and caused harmful spam on public Reticulum transports. That was unacceptable. It was irresponsible to the Reticulum community and embarrassing for this project.

The Python daemon is now maintenance-only. Public-network behavior is being cut back, rate-limited, and deprecated. The Python Meshtastic/MQTT bridge is disabled by a local startup/config poison pill; remove any meshtastic or mqtt bridge sections from old configs. New transport and bridge work belongs in styrene-rs, not here. See docs/python-daemon-maintenance-policy.md for the maintenance and archival policy.

Daemon, library, and TUI for Reticulum mesh networks.

Overview

styrened is the core of the Styrene mesh networking stack. It provides a headless daemon for edge devices, a terminal UI for interactive fleet management, and a Python library for building mesh applications on RNS/LXMF.

Key Features:

• Mesh daemon — headless operation on edge devices (Raspberry Pi, NixOS, containers)
• Terminal UI — full-featured TUI for fleet management, chat, device provisioning
• RPC over LXMF — remote device management (status, exec, reboot, config)
• Device discovery — automatic mesh topology tracking
• Auto-reply — automated message responses with cooldown
• Direct links — point-to-point RNS links for status queries and speedtests
• Mesh VPN — WireGuard tunnels bootstrapped over LXMF (IPv6 ULA addressing)
• HTTP API (optional) — REST/WebSocket endpoints for external integration
• Nix flake — declarative NixOS deployment with OCI container builds

Installation

# Full stack: daemon + TUI (via meta-package)
pip install styrene

# Daemon only (minimal dependencies)
pip install styrened

# Daemon + TUI
pip install styrened[tui]

# All extras
pip install styrened[tui,web,metrics,yubikey]

Nix Flake

nix run github:styrene-lab/styrened

Container

docker pull ghcr.io/styrene-lab/styrened:latest

Usage

# Run daemon
styrened daemon

# Run TUI
styrene

# CLI tools
styrened devices              # List discovered mesh devices
styrened devices -w 10        # Wait 10s for announces
styrened status               # Local daemon health
styrened status <dest>        # Query remote node
styrened send <dest> "hello"  # Send message
styrened exec <dest> uptime   # Remote command execution
styrened doctor               # Installation diagnostics
styrened doctor --setup       # Interactive setup wizard
styrened identity             # Show local identity

Architecture

┌──────────────────────────────────────┐
│  styrened                            │
│  ├── tui/          Terminal UI       │  pip install styrened[tui]
│  ├── services/     Business logic    │
│  ├── protocols/    LXMF routing      │
│  ├── rpc/          Remote mgmt       │
│  ├── models/       Data models       │
│  └── web/          HTTP API          │  pip install styrened[web]
├──────────────────────────────────────┤
│  RNS + LXMF (Reticulum Stack)       │
└──────────────────────────────────────┘

Async-first — all network operations use asyncio. The daemon runs an event loop with periodic tasks for announces, discovery, and mesh maintenance.

Protocol discrimination — LXMF messages are routed to handlers based on fields["protocol"], supporting chat (NomadNet/MeshChat), Styrene wire protocol, and VPN handshake messages.

Configuration

Config file: ~/.styrene/config.yaml

identity:
  display_name: "My Node"

reticulum:
  mode: standalone
  interfaces:
    peers:
      - host: rns.styrene.io
        port: 4242

rpc:
  enabled: true

chat:
  auto_reply_mode: template
  auto_reply_message: "Automated node"

mesh_vpn:
  enabled: false
  gateway: false

Installation Extras

Extra	Adds
[tui]	Terminal UI (textual, psutil)
[web]	HTTP API (fastapi, uvicorn)
[metrics]	Prometheus metrics
[yubikey]	YubiKey authentication

Development

git clone https://github.com/styrene-lab/styrened
cd styrened
pip install -e ".[tui,dev]"

just test-unit    # ~5s, 2200+ tests
just test         # Full suite
make lint         # ruff
make typecheck    # mypy
make validate     # lint + typecheck + test

Related Projects

• styrene-rs — Rust RNS/LXMF implementation (interoperable wire protocol)
• styrene-pypi — PyPI meta-package (pip install styrene)
• Reticulum — The underlying mesh networking stack

License

MIT