QRDrop

Open it on your PC, scan the QR with your phone's camera, and send photos, files, or text straight through a real peer-to-peer WebRTC connection — no app, no cable, no cloud storage in between. A fork of PairDrop with a camera-first pairing flow and a full rebuild of the UI.

Por qué

PairDrop (which this is built on) already proves the demand: it's a maintained fork of Snapdrop with thousands of GitHub stars, solving the everyday annoyance of "how do I get this file from my phone to my PC without a cable or uploading it somewhere." What I changed is how you pair: PairDrop's normal flow is typing a room code by hand. Here, the PC screen shows a QR code and your phone's camera does the pairing — the same motion everyone already does to open a menu or a payment link, no code to type.

Qué cambié sobre PairDrop

• Custom two-screen QR-first pairing flow (scan → send) replacing manual room-code entry
• Bidirectional minimalist text transfer between PC and phone
• PC→phone photo sending, in addition to the original phone→PC direction
• Room persistence across reloads, so a QR code someone already has open on their phone doesn't go stale the moment the PC tab refreshes
• Debounced reconnect handling for transient WebRTC disconnects
• TURN server config via an environment variable instead of a file committed to the repo
• A full visual redesign: bold flat color blocks, custom typography, real motion — replacing the original PairDrop look

Cómo lo verifiqué

An automated test can't physically point a camera at a QR code. So the test does exactly what a real phone scan produces: it reads the same URL the QR encodes (send.html?room_id=<id>) and opens it in a second, completely separate headless Chromium instance — then lets the actual signaling server and a real WebRTC data channel between two real browsers do the rest. Nothing about the transfer itself is mocked.

The file-transfer test hashes the file on both ends (SHA-256) to prove the bytes that arrive are identical to the bytes that were sent, not just "some file arrived."

Features

• Scan-to-pair: no typing, no account, no app install
• Send original-quality or auto-compressed photos
• Send arbitrary files, individually or as a batch download
• Send quick text messages in either direction
• Works over your local network or the internet via PairDrop's public rooms
• Self-hostable — deploy your own instance in one click (see below)

Deploy your own instance

This runs a small persistent Node.js server for WebRTC signaling, so it can't be hosted on a static site like GitHub Pages. It ships with a Dockerfile and a render.yaml, so the button above deploys a working instance to Render's free tier in a couple of minutes — or run docker build . -t qrdrop && docker run -p 3000:3000 qrdrop anywhere else that runs containers.

Run locally

npm install
npm start
# open http://localhost:3000

Testing

npm install
npx playwright install chromium
npm test

4 end-to-end tests, driving two real headless Chromium browsers against the real server:

• Real file transfer — phone sends a file to PC over an actual WebRTC data channel; the received file is verified byte-identical to the original via SHA-256
• Real text transfer — phone sends a text message to PC, content verified on arrival
• Room persistence — reloading the PC tab keeps the same room id, so an already-scanned QR code keeps working
• Invalid link handling — opening the send screen with no room_id shows the invalid-link screen instead of a broken UI

CI runs the full suite on every push.

License

This is a fork of PairDrop by Schlagmichdoch, itself based on Snapdrop by Robin Linus. Licensed under GPL-3.0, same as upstream — see LICENSE.