Pear DocsPear by Holepunch
Pear loads applications from peers—an installable P2P runtime and toolchain for mobile, desktop, and terminal.
Pear by Holepunch
Pear loads applications remotely from peers and lets anyone create and share applications with peers.
Pear is an installable peer-to-peer runtime, development, and deployment platform. Build, share, and extend unstoppable, zero-infrastructure P2P apps for mobile, desktop, and terminal.
Welcome to the Internet of Peers.
– Holepunch, the P2P Company
Showcase
Peer-to-peer applications built on, deployed with, and running on Pear:
Find what you need
Pick the section that matches what you're trying to do. New to Pear? Start with Getting started below — a short introduction and three-step path (chat, persistence, ship and update); the hands-on chat is about 15 minutes, no clone, on Build a peer-to-peer chat.
Getting Started — learn by doing
A four-part type-along that builds a peer-to-peer Electron chat, adds persistence with Corestore, then ships and updates it. About 15 minutes for the first part; no clone required.
About Pear — understand this
Conceptual background on Pear's design — runtime and languages, storage and distribution, and dependencies on the network. Use this when you want to know why, not how.
How To — do this specific thing
Goal-oriented recipes for tasks like connecting peers, replicating Hypercores, deploying an app, or troubleshooting common issues. Assumes you already know roughly what you're doing.
Reference — look this up
Authoritative descriptions of Pear's CLI, runtime API, configuration, and the modules underneath. Use this when you need a fact, not a tutorial.
Stability legend
Module pages call out a stability indicator. The four levels:
| Stability | Description |
|---|---|
| stable | Unlikely to change or be removed in the foreseeable future. |
| experimental | New, untested, or has known issues. |
| deprecated | Being removed or replaced in the future. |
| unstable | May change or be removed without warning. |
Glossary
- API — Application Programming Interface
- CLI — Command-Line Interface
- link — a
pear://link, afile://link, or an absolute / relative directory path - P2P — peer-to-peer
Boilerplates
Starter paths in these docs (desktop, macOS / Linux / Windows):
- Getting started — type-along chat, persistence, then ship and update.
- Pear desktop application architecture — how Electron, Bare workers, storage, and OTA fit together.
- Release pipeline — stage → provision → multisig and release lines.
The upstream Electron template used by the team is holepunchto/hello-pear-electron on GitHub (clone there for a ready-made repo; use the links above for explanations and procedures).
Module catalog
The full list of pear-* and bare-* modules — application libraries, UI libraries, common libraries, developer libraries, integration libraries — lives at Reference → Modules and Reference → Bare modules. Building-block libraries (Hypercore, Hyperbee, Hyperdrive, …), helpers (Corestore, Localdrive, …), and CLI tools have full reference pages under Reference.