OpenDHT

OpenDHT is a lightweight Distributed Hash Table implementation providing an easy to use distributed in-memory data store.

Key Features

• Lightweight and scalable, designed for large networks and small devices
• High resilience to network disruption
• Public key cryptography layer providing optional data signature and encryption
• IPv4 and IPv6 support
• Python 3 bindings
• REST API with optional HTTP client+server with push notification support

Every node in the network can read and write values to the store. Values are distributed over the network with redundancy.

Installation

Install on Linux, macOS and Windows with:

pip install opendht

Quick Example

Using the simple, blocking API:

import opendht as dht

node = dht.DhtRunner()
node.run()

# Join the DHT network through any running node,
# here using a known bootstrap node.
node.bootstrap("bootstrap.jami.net", "4222")

# blocking call (provide callback arguments to make the call non-blocking)
node.put(dht.InfoHash.get("unique_key"), dht.Value(b'some binary data'))

results = node.get(dht.InfoHash.get("unique_key"))
for value in results:
    print(value)

Or using asyncio:

import asyncio
import opendht.aio as dht

async def dht_async_demo(key_str: str):
    # Start a new node using an async context manager.
    # It is also possible to call run()/await shutdown() manually.
    async with dht.DhtRunner(
        bootstrap=(("bootstrap.jami.net", "4222"),)
    ) as node:
        # compute key hash
        key = dht.InfoHash.get(key_str)

        # put data, waiting for completion
        await node.put(key, dht.Value(b'tata data'))

        # get all values at key
        results = await node.getAll(key)
        for value in results:
            print(value)
        
        # same operation, but stream values as they come from the network
        with node.get(key) as results:
            async for value in results:
                print(value)

        # listen for change of values at key
        with node.listen(key) as values:
            async for value, expired in values:
                print(value)
                if value.data == b'tata data':
                    break

asyncio.run(dht_async_demo("unique_key"))

Documentation

For more information, examples and documentation, or to repport issues, visit: https://opendht.net

License

Copyright (c) 2014-2026 Savoir-faire Linux Inc.

OpenDHT is released under the MIT License. See LICENSE for details.