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 their own subdomains, just how RecNet was.

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 (some had leaks of old code).
2. None of them run on microservice architecture, most on a single server.
3. None of them had unit tests.
4. "Upgrading the server" is not sustainable plan for growth.
5. This was fun (sort of).

RecFlare uses a true microservice architecture which, if developed correctly, is near infinitely scalable and could support the same number of concurrent users as the original game. It will never run out of CPU, memory, or disk space.

Being truly open source means that this project should have more eyes on it, resulting in bugs getting fixed faster. I hope.

Of course, cloud services cost money. That's the only limitation.

Client

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

Generally speaking any client that effectively rewrites the nameserver can be used with this server.

See the above project page for information on how to mod the game to connect to this server.

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://match.<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

This is a list of 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	moderation	—	Not yet implemented
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, the 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?

• Makes it easy to mirror RecNet Rec Room's backend is (was) a set of independent microservices, not one big monolith. Modeling each service as its own isolated 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.
• It's free/cheap to run a lot of service. 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. Additionally for development or maybe a private instance, the cost is near zero when not in use.
• Bundled Cloud CDN/Storage/SQL Cloudflare offers several cloud services we can rely on so the microservices can remain stateless (effectively read-only). They are also scalable by default so we don't need to worry about adding more disk space or upgrading services. If we start outgrowing the limits of these, well, we'll cross that bridge when we get to it. - D1 (a SQLite-compatible distributed database) - R2 (service like S3 for mass file hosting) - KV (service to distributed offer key/value stores) - Durable Objects (for a notifications hub)

Do I have to use Cloudflare?

Short answer, 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.

Long answer: the catch is everything around the code. RecFlare leans on Cloudflare for the deployment (Wrangler) 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.

So for example if you wanted to run on Vercel, you'd have to swap out KV for Redis, which are very similar services but would require small code changes.

Prerequisites

• node (modern)
• pnpm
• bun
• jq/awk/sed
• A Cloudflare account with a zone (domain) you control, for deploying.

Cloudflare's free plan is good enough for testing (100k worker requests/day) but the Rec Room client is pretty chatty. Frequent testing may exhaust that quota. The $5/month Worker plan includes 10M/month.

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

Getting Started

Install dependencies:

just install

Configure your custom domain:

Create a new .env file from the template:

cp .env.example .env

Edit .env and set RECFLARE_DOMAIN to your domain (or declare it with export RECFLARE_DOMAIN=rec.example.com)

(Optional) - per-app subdomain overrides come from RECFLARE_SUBDOMAINS (a JSON object, e.g. '{"playersettings":"settings"}'). This would be used if you wanted to merge two services together.

Create the storage resources:

The workers bind Cloudflare storage primitive. Create them once against your Cloudflare account, then record the IDs in .env. The committed wrangler.jsonc files carry "local" placeholders; the real IDs are spliced in at deploy time, so nothing in version control needs editing. Authenticate wrangler first (wrangler login).

wrangler d1 create recflare
wrangler kv namespace create RECFLARE_MATCH_PRESENCE
wrangler kv namespace create RECFLARE_PLAYER_SETTINGS

Take the IDs output from the commands and put them into .env. (or with CI: RECFLARE_KV='{"RECFLARE_MATCH_PRESENCE":"<id>","RECFLARE_PLAYER_SETTINGS":"<id>"}')

Then apply the schema. just migrate will set up the database and populate it with data. This runs non-interactively, so be careful!

just migrate                 # migrate every worker that owns migrations
just migrate -F rooms        # or scope to one worker

R2 and Durable Objects

You only have to create the buckets:

wrangler r2 bucket create recflare-cdn
wrangler r2 bucket create recflare-img

Durable Objects

Nothing manual to do here. The object is created manually.

Run the development microservices:

Note: This runs, but the name-server document still advertises the deployed hosts, not your local instances — so service discovery won't resolve locally. You can still call each service directly; each Wrangler instance runs on its own port. Maybe we can get this working somehow. @todo

just dev

Deploy all workers:

This will deploy all workers to respective endpoints (*.example.com)

Deploying requires wrangler to be authenticated against your Cloudflare account (wrangler login, or CLOUDFLARE_API_TOKEN / CLOUDFLARE_ACCOUNT_ID in the environment).

It requires the storage to be set up above, otherwise, deployments may fail.

You can always re-run it as often as you wish.

just deploy # for all services
just deploy -F rooms # for a single microservice

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.

FAQ

What year is this for?

This works with 2023 clients. It has been tested with manifest 7859140924515540835. Other clients may not work.

See the "Client" section above for instructions on how to modify a client to connect to this server.

Can I run this locally on my PC?

It's not currently supported. But theoretically, you could.

See "Run the development microservices" above. It may be possible later as Wrangler will mock remote services. YMMV for now.

Can I use this to make my own server?

Yes, that's the point. Just set your custom domain and deploy it.

Is there an admin panel?

Not yet. But there could be.

Can I copy this project and modify it?

Yes, see the LICENSE.

I would love if you contributed your changes back.

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.