PeerTube

Decentralized video streaming platform using P2P (BitTorrent) directly in the web browser with WebTorrent.

PeerTube is sponsored by Framasoft, a non-profit that promotes, spreads and develops free-libre software. If you want to support this project, please consider donating them.

Client

Server

Demonstration

Want to see in action?

Demo server
Video to see how the "decentralization feature" looks like
Experimental demo servers that share videos (they are in the same network): peertube2, peertube3. Since I do experiments with them, sometimes they might not work correctly.

Why

We can't build a FOSS video streaming alternatives to YouTube, Dailymotion, Vimeo... with a centralized software. One organization alone cannot have enough money to pay bandwidth and video storage of its server.

So we need to have a decentralized network (as Diaspora for example). But it's not enough because one video could become famous and overload the server. It's the reason why we need to use a P2P protocol to limit the server load. Thanks to WebTorrent, we can make P2P (thus bittorrent) inside the web browser right now.

Features

Installation

See wiki for complete installation commands.

Front compatibility

Chromium
Firefox (>= 42 for MediaSource support)

Dependencies

NodeJS >= 6.x
npm >= 3.x
yarn
OpenSSL (cli)
PostgreSQL
FFmpeg

Debian

Install NodeJS 6.x (previous LTS): https://nodejs.org/en/download/package-manager/#debian-and-ubuntu-based-linux-distributions
Install yarn: https://yarnpkg.com/en/docs/install
Add jessie backports to your source.list: http://backports.debian.org/Instructions/
Run:

$ apt-get update $ apt-get install ffmpeg postgresql-9.4 openssl

Ubuntu 16.04

Install NodeJS 8.x (current LTS): (same as Debian)
Install yarn: (same as Debian)
Run:

$ apt-get update $ apt-get install ffmpeg postgresql openssl

Other distribution... (PR welcome)

Sources

$ git clone -b master https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube
$ cd PeerTube
$ yarn install
$ npm run build

Usage

Production

If you want to run PeerTube for production (bad idea for now :) ):

$ cp config/production.yaml.example config/production.yaml

Then edit the config/production.yaml file according to your webserver configuration. Keys set in this file will override those of config/default.yml.

Finally, run the server with the production NODE_ENV variable set.

$ NODE_ENV=production npm start

The administrator password is automatically generated and can be found in the logs. You can set another password with:

$ NODE_ENV=production npm run reset-password -- -u root

Nginx template (reverse proxy): https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/tree/master/support/nginx
Systemd template: https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/tree/master/support/systemd

You can check the application (CORS headers, tracker websocket...) by running:

$ NODE_ENV=production npm run check

Upgrade

The following commands will upgrade the source (according to your current branch), upgrade node modules and rebuild client application:

# systemctl stop peertube
$ npm run upgrade-peertube
# systemctl start peertube

Development

In this mode, the server will run requests between instances more quickly, the video durations are limited to a few seconds.

To develop on the server-side (server files are automatically compiled when we modify them and the server restarts automatically too):

$ npm run dev:server

The server (with the client) will listen on localhost:9000.

To develop on the client side (client files are automatically compiled when we modify them):

$ npm run dev:client

The API will listen on localhost:9000 and the frontend on localhost:3000 (with hot module replacement, you don't need to refresh the web browser).

Username: root
Password: test

Test with 3 fresh nodes

$ npm run clean:server:test
$ npm run play

Then you will get access to the three nodes at http://localhost:900{1,2,3} with the root as username and test{1,2,3} for the password.

Other commands

To print all available command run:

$ npm run help

Contributing

See the contributing guide.

See the server code documentation.

See the client code documentation.

Architecture

See ARCHITECTURE.md for a more detailed explication.

Backend

The backend is a REST API
Servers communicate with each others with Activity Pub
Each server has its own users who query it (search videos, where the torrent URI of this specific video is...)
If a user upload a video, the server seeds it and sends the video information (name, short description, torrent URI...) its followers
A server is a tracker responsible for all the videos uploaded in it
Even if nobody watches a video, it is seeded by the server (through WebSeed protocol) where the video was uploaded

Here are some simple schemes:

jnaudon / peertube Goto Github PK

peertube's Introduction