PeerTube

Federated (ActivityPub) 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

• Frontend
  • Angular frontend
• Join the fediverse
  • Follow other instances
  • Unfollow an instance
  • Get for the followers/following list
• Upload a video
  • Seed the video
  • Send the meta data with ActivityPub to followers
• Remove the video
• List the videos
• View the video in an HTML5 player with WebTorrent
• Admin panel
• OpenGraph tags
• OEmbed
• Update video
• Videos view counter
• Videos likes/dislikes
• Transcoding to different definitions
• Download file/torrent
• User video bytes quota
• User video channels
• NSFW warnings/settings
• Video description in markdown
• User roles (administrator, moderator)
• User registration
• Video privacy settings (public, unlisted or private)
• Signaling a video to the admin origin PeerTube instance
• Videos comments
• User playlist
• User subscriptions (by tags, author...)
• Add "DDOS" security

Installation

See wiki for complete installation commands.

Front compatibility

• Chromium
• Firefox (>= 42 for MediaSource support)

Dependencies

• NodeJS >= 8.x
• yarn
• OpenSSL (cli)
• PostgreSQL
• FFmpeg

Debian

1. Install NodeJS 8.x (current LTS): https://nodejs.org/en/download/package-manager/#debian-and-ubuntu-based-linux-distributions
2. Install yarn: https://yarnpkg.com/en/docs/install
3. Run:

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

Ubuntu 16.04

1. Install NodeJS 8.x (current LTS): (same as Debian)
2. Install yarn: (same as Debian)
3. 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: