VNOX

Self-hosted realtime voice and chat. Decentralized. Lightweight. Moddable. Built on LNEx, a custom protocol for low-latency federated communication.

Not Discord. Not TeamSpeak. Not cloud.

vnox://server/channel

Quick links

• Architecture
• Protocol
• Current status and limitations
• Server setup
• Local dev config
• Contributing
• Changelog

Status

Phase 1: implemented, not production ready.

See docs/00-status.md for an honest list of what works, what is only specified on paper, and known gaps.

Component	Status
Gateway	TCP listener, LNEx handshake, channels, chat, SQLite
Voice node	UDP relay, voice packet routing
Desktop client	egui UI, net layer, audio pipeline (partial)
LNEx protocol	Specified and implemented (JSON in Phase 1)
Federation	Planned (Phase 3)
Mobile client	Planned (Phase 3)

Traffic in v0.1.x is unencrypted plaintext. Do not use in production.

Running locally

Requires Rust 1.85+.

# terminal 1 - gateway
cargo run -p vnox-gateway -- --config dev/config.toml

# terminal 2 - voice node
cargo run -p vnox-voice-node -- --config dev/config.toml

# terminal 3 - client
cargo run -p vnox-client

The client connects to 127.0.0.1:7600 by default (editable in the UI). Config details: dev/README.md.

Opus on Windows

audiopus_sys builds libopus from source via CMake. CMake 4.x requires a policy flag, already set in .cargo/config.toml:

[env]
CMAKE_POLICY_VERSION_MINIMUM = "3.5"

No manual steps needed.

License

GPL-3.0. See docs/LICENSE.md.

The LNEx protocol specification is CC0 (public domain).