Introduction

Hocuspocus is a suite of tools to bring collaboration to your application. It’s based on Y.js (by Kevin Jahns), which is amazing to sync and merge changes from clients in real-time. But you can also use it to build offline-first apps, and sync changes later. We’ll make sure to resolve conflicts and keep everything in sync, always.

#What is Y.js?

Y.js merges changes from users without conflicts and in real-time. Compared to other implementations, it is super performant and “kicks the pants off” (Joseph Gentle, Ex-Google Wave Engineer, source).

For such a Conflict-free Replication Data Type (CRDT), it doesn’t matter in which order changes are applied. It’s a little bit like Git, where it doesn’t matter when changes are committed. Also, every copy of the data is worth the same.

This enables you to build performant real-time applications, add collaboration to your existing app, sync awareness states and think offline-first.

#The Hocuspocus Server

With Y.js, you can use whatever network protocol you like to send changes to other clients, but the most popular one is a WebSocket. The Hocuspocus Server is a WebSocket backend, which has everything to get started quickly, to integrate Y.js in your existing infrastructure and to scale to a million users.

#Features

• Merges changes without conflicts
• Doesn’t care when changes come in
• Can sync your whole application state
• Collaborative text editing (with Tiptap, Slate, Quill, Monaco or ProseMirror)
• Integrates into existing applications
• Sends changes to Webhooks
• Scales to millions of users with Redis
• Written in TypeScript