RecFlare

RecFlare is an implementation of RecNet — the Rec Room backend — built on Cloudflare Workers. It implements the network services the Rec Room client talks to — accounts, auth, rooms, matchmaking, economy, chat, notifications, and more — each as an independent Worker on its own subdomain.

Disclaimer: This is an unofficial, fan-made project for preservation and experimentation. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Rec Room Inc. "Rec Room" is a trademark of its respective owner.

Why?

There are already so many multiplayer clones, why?

1. None of them are fully open source
2. None of them run on microservice architecture
3. "Upgrading the server" is not a lasting fix

RecFlare uses a true microservice architecture which, if developed correctly, is near infinitely scalable and could support the same number of concurrent users that the original game had.

Of course, all you need is money for the cloud costs...

Client

RecFlare is compatible with the CannedNet client and the build of Rec Room with manifest 7859140924515540835. Other client or game versions expect different endpoints and response shapes and are not supported.

How it works

The Rec Room client discovers every service by fetching an endpoints document from the name-server (ns) worker at the apex domain. That document maps each service to a host like https://api.<your-domain>. Every service runs as a separate Cloudflare Worker attached to its own subdomain, so the client's traffic fans out across the workers in apps/.

Authentication is a Bearer-JWT flow: the auth worker issues tokens from /connect/token and owns the shared accounts table; every other worker validates that token on its auth-gated routes.

State is persisted with Cloudflare's storage primitives — the workers are completely stateless and no data is stored alongside the microservices.

Services

These are every RecNet service the client discovers, taken from the service-discovery map in apps/ns/src/endpoints.ts. Each is reached at https://<subdomain>.<your-domain>. Services with a worker in apps/ are implemented here; the rest are advertised in the endpoints document but not yet backed by a Worker. Not all services are fully implemented.

Service	Subdomain	Worker	Notes
Accounts	accounts	accounts	Player accounts & profile reads/writes (D1)
AI	ai	—	Not yet implemented
API	api	api	Core Game API — config, social, avatar, rooms, image uploads (D1, R2)
Auth	auth	auth	OAuth token issuance (/connect/token); owns the accounts table (D1, KV)
BugReporting	bugreporting	—	Not yet implemented
Cards	cards	—	Not yet implemented
CDN	cdn	cdn	Binary CDN — signature blobs & room build data (R2)
Chat	chat	chat	Chat service
Clubs	clubs	clubs	Clubs
CMS	cms	—	Not yet implemented
Commerce	commerce	commerce	Store / purchase endpoints
Data	data	—	Not yet implemented
DataCollection	datacollection	datacollection	Client telemetry / analytics sink
Discovery	discovery	—	Not yet implemented
Econ	econ	econ	Economy & avatar endpoints (separate from api)
GameLogs	gamelogs	—	Not yet implemented
Geo	geo	—	Not yet implemented
Images	img	img	Image storage & signed delivery (R2)
Leaderboard	leaderboard	—	Not yet implemented
Link	link	—	Not yet implemented
Lists	lists	—	Not yet implemented
Matchmaking	match	match	Matchmaking & per-player presence (D1, KV)
Moderation	api	api	Served by the api worker (shares the API host)
Notifications	notify	notify	Real-time notifications over SignalR/WebSockets (Durable Object)
PlatformNotifications	platformnotifications	—	Not yet implemented
PlayerSettings	playersettings	playersettings	Per-player settings (KV)
RoomComments	roomcomments	—	Not yet implemented
RoomieIntegrations	roomieintegrations	—	Not yet implemented
Rooms	rooms	rooms	Room storage & queries; seeds the Dorm & Orientation rooms (D1)
Storage	storage	—	Not yet implemented
Strings	strings	—	Not yet implemented
StringsCDN	strings-cdn	—	Not yet implemented
Studio	studio	—	Not yet implemented
Thorn	thorn	—	Not yet implemented
Videos	videos	—	Not yet implemented
WWW	www	—	Website host (not a Worker)

Additionally there is a small ns worker itself serves this discovery document at the apex/ns host and isn't listed within it. Each implemented worker has its own README.md under apps/<name>/ documenting its routes.

Why Cloudflare?

• It's free to run a lot of services. Cloudflare Workers' free tier is keyed to usage, not to the number of Workers — so whether you deploy 1 service or all 36, the baseline cost is the same. You only start paying once usage crosses the free-tier limits.
• It mirrors RecNet's architecture. Rec Room's backend is a set of independent microservices, not one monolith. Modeling each service as its own Worker keeps RecFlare's structure close to the real thing — services scale, fail, and deploy independently — instead of collapsing everything into a single giant server.

Do I have to use Cloudflare?

No. The services are plain Hono apps, so the request-handling code isn't tied to Cloudflare and can be deployed to other hosting providers — AWS (Lambda), Vercel, Netlify, Fly.io, a plain Node/Bun server, and so on.

The catch is everything around the code. RecFlare leans on Cloudflare for the deployment and infrastructure layer — custom-domain routing per service, plus the storage bindings (D1, KV, R2, Durable Objects) the workers use. On another provider you'll need to provide equivalents (per-service routing, databases, object storage, a pub/sub or WebSocket layer) and wire up the deployment yourself.

Prerequisites

• node.js v22 or later
• pnpm v10 or later
• bun 1.2 or later
• A Cloudflare account with a zone (domain) you control, for deploying

The free plan is good enough for testing (100k requests/day) but the client is pretty chatty, so frequent testing may exhauast that quota.

See https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/pricing/#workers

Getting Started

Install dependencies:

just install

Configure your custom domain:

For local development, set your base domain in a .env file at the repo root; it is gitignored, so each clone needs its own copy. (For CI you can skip the file and export RECFLARE_DOMAIN directly — see below.)

cp .env.example .env
# edit .env and set RECFLARE_DOMAIN to your domain

just deploy resolves the base domain at deploy time and passes it to wrangler — each worker is attached to its custom domain via --domain <subdomain>.<domain>, and the base domain is injected as the DOMAIN var so the ns service-discovery document and the api share-link base URL are built at runtime. Nothing in version control is rewritten; committed wrangler.jsonc files have no routes.

The domain comes from the RECFLARE_DOMAIN environment variable; for local dev that's loaded from .env, and an already-exported value (e.g. a CI secret) takes precedence over the file. Per-app subdomain overrides come from RECFLARE_SUBDOMAINS (a JSON object, e.g. {"playersettings":"settings"}). For CI, set RECFLARE_DOMAIN as a secret and skip .env entirely:

RECFLARE_DOMAIN=rec.example.com just deploy

Run the development server:

just dev

Deploy all workers:

just deploy

Deploying requires wrangler to be authenticated against your Cloudflare account (wrangler login, or CLOUDFLARE_API_TOKEN / CLOUDFLARE_ACCOUNT_ID in the environment). Storage resources (D1 databases, KV namespaces, R2 buckets) must be created and their ids set in each worker's wrangler.jsonc — see the inline comments in those files for the exact wrangler commands.

Repository Structure

• apps/ - The service workers, one deployable Worker per subdirectory. Each has its own README.md, wrangler.jsonc, src/, and tests.
• packages/ - Shared libraries and configuration used across the workers.
  • @repo/hono-helpers - Hono framework utilities (logging, error handling).
  • @repo/tools - The runx CLI and the bin/ scripts each worker's package.json delegates to, so build/test/deploy stays consistent.
  • @repo/typescript-config, @repo/oxlint-config - Shared TS and lint config.
• turbo/generators/ - turbo gen templates for scaffolding new workers/packages.
• Justfile - Convenient aliases for common development tasks.

Available Commands

This repository uses a Justfile. Run just (or just --list) to see every command. Some key ones:

• just install - Install all dependencies.
• just dev - Start the dev server (context-aware: runs bun runx dev).
• just build - Build all workers.
• just test - Run tests (vitest).
• just check - Check code quality: deps, lint, types, format.
• just fix - Fix code issues: deps, lint, format, workers-types.
• just deploy - Deploy all workers to your domain.
• just new-worker (alias: just gen) - Scaffold a new service worker.
• just new-package - Scaffold a new shared package.
• just update deps - Update dependencies across the monorepo with syncpack.

For a single worker, scope with -F, e.g. just deploy -F playersettings.

Why a monorepo?

The services share types, auth logic, and tooling, so keeping them in one repo keeps those in sync: pnpm workspaces share dependencies, @repo/ packages share code, Turborepo runs build/test/lint with a single cached task graph, and cross-service changes land in one atomic commit.