@particle-academy/fancy-cf-relay

A CDN-safe browser relay channel for agent-integrations' RelayTransport.

Why this exists

The MCP relay's receive leg is normally a long-lived SSE stream. Behind a Cloudflare HTTP/3 (QUIC) edge, that stream gets reset (net::ERR_QUIC_PROTOCOL_ERROR) and agent connect-and-drive silently dies. The failure is in the edge, not the app — so no header or flush fixes it.

This channel keeps SSE where it works and transparently uses long-poll (short requests QUIC is happy with — only long-lived streams break) where it doesn't. It auto-detects Cloudflare via the cf-ray header and falls back if SSE errors before delivering. No disabling HTTP/3, no config.

Not Cloudflare-specific under the hood — it survives any CDN/proxy that's hostile to long-lived SSE. The name just names the case you'll hit first.

Install

npm i @particle-academy/fancy-cf-relay

Use

import { createRelayChannel } from "@particle-academy/fancy-cf-relay";
import { attachRelay } from "@particle-academy/agent-integrations";

const handle = createRelayChannel({
  baseUrl: "/agent-relay",
  session,
  token,
  transport: "auto",                 // "auto" | "sse" | "longpoll"
  onFrame: (raw) => transport.deliverFromRemote(raw),
});

const transport = attachRelay(server, handle.channel);
await handle.start();   // opens the receive leg (SSE or long-poll)
// …
handle.stop();          // tears it down

transport: "auto" (default): behind Cloudflare → long-poll immediately; otherwise SSE, falling back to long-poll if the stream errors early. handle.mode reports the transport actually in use.

The poll wire-protocol (server side)

Long-poll expects a poll endpoint alongside the existing relay routes:

GET {baseUrl}/{session}/poll?token=…&direction=inbound&wait=20000&subscriber=…
  → 200 application/json  { "subscriber": "<id>", "frames": ["<raw frame>", …] }

The server registers subscriber (returning a fresh id when absent), parks up to wait ms draining that subscriber's frame queue, then returns (possibly empty). The client re-polls immediately, sending the subscriber back each time.

Park length matters by runtime: on Node a parked request is ~free (event loop); on PHP-FPM it holds a worker for the park window, so keep wait ≤ ~20s and leave FPM headroom. Drop-in endpoints: the Node relay server in agent-integrations, and the particle-academy/fancy-cf-relay Laravel companion.

Outgoing frames POST as before — POST {baseUrl}/{session}/outbox?token=… — short requests, unaffected by the edge.

License

MIT