justcast.it

1-click live streaming from a web app.

Contributing

Pull Requests are always welcome! Also feel free to just open issues if you don't have the time to figure it out or have problems getting started.

Setup

1. Install Node.js and Yarn.
2. Clone the repository.
3. Run yarn to install all the project dependencies.
   • Make sure you have rsync available as well. This is the biggest tech debt on the build pipeline as we only use it for copying some files around (PRs welcome!).
4. Run yarn build to make sure you can build the project.

Running the app

1. Access the Livepeer Studio dashboard and create an API key.
2. Create a .env file in the root of the project with the following content:

   LIVEPEER_API_KEY={{ API key from the step above }}

3. Run yarn start to start the web server and access it on http://localhost:8080.

To build the docker image you can also run yarn docker:build and then yarn docker:start to start it locally, accessing it on the same endpoint. The docker compose deployment will automatically pickup the env from the .env file as well.

Development

For quicker development cycles, you can run yarn watch to recompile and reload the server any time you make a change to the source code.

The current architecture is as vanilla as possible, with static files served by the same web server that serves the API. This allows for the most lightweight experience possible, but also means that you can't use any fancy features like hot module reloading. If you want to work on the frontend, you'll have to reload the page manually.

That also means that deploying this project is as simple as running a docker container, but on the other hand we can't use higher-level development platforms like Vercel very easily.

Deployment

To deploy the project, you only need to run the Docker container in a publicly accessible endpoint and with access to a Livepeer API key in the environment variables. It can even be the same one that you use for dev, but it's recommended to create a new one for production.

The pre-built docker container is also publicly available on Docker Hub in the victorges/justcast.it repository.

So TL;DR, all you need to do is:

• Decide on a platform where you want to run your container (e.g. Fly.io, Google Cloud, Okteto, Heroku, Azure, AWS...)
• Deploy a container with the image victorges/justcast.it:latest
• Set an environment variable called LIVEPEER_API_KEY with your API key. Ideally this should be a "secret" value, each provider will have their own abstractions for this
• Access it from a public URL (this also changes per provider)

Cloud Providers

fly.io

This app is currently deployed through fly.io. It provides the best and easiest experience for simply running a container with a public endpoint. It also has a free tier, but you do need to set up a credit card on sign-up.

Since we already have the configuration files for it, after configuring your flyctl CLI:

• Create an app on your account (you'll choose or get a random app name):

  flyctl apps create

• Create a secret with your Livepeer API key:

  flyctl secrets set --app {{ your app name }} LIVEPEER_API_KEY={{ your API key }}

• Deploy the app:

  flyctl deploy --config ops/fly.toml --app {{ your app name }}

Okteto

This is a good alternative if you're not willing to put your credit card information anywhere. It is slightly more expensive though if you don't want your apps sleeping automatically after a while without deploys.

It also supports the Docker Compose syntax for deployment, which we already have in the root of the project. You will only need to add an endpoints config to expose the service on the internet via HTTPS. Check this commit for an example.

Google Cloud Run

Google Cloud Run is actually a pretty good option as well and really easy to use. Although it might be a little more bureaucratic, you can also save a lot of money on the infra bill since your app can automatically sleep when it's not in use. Follow this for a quick guide on deploying a container there.

The biggest problem is that it doesn't run images from Docker Hub. So you'll need to push the images to the Google Container Registry and only then deploy it on Cloud Run. See this StackOverflow answer for more details.

Contact

Feel free to open an issue to start a discussion or just chat on Discord (victorges#0420).

License

MIT