WatchParty

An website for watching videos together.

Description

• Synchronizes the video being watched with the current room
• Plays, pauses, and seeks are synced to all watchers
• Supports:
  • Screen sharing (full screen, browser tab or application)
  • Launch a shared virtual browser in the cloud (similar to rabb.it)
  • Stream-your-own-file
  • Video files on the Internet (anything accessible via HTTP)
  • YouTube videos
  • Magnet links (via WebTorrent)
  • .m3u8 streams (HLS)
• Create separate rooms for users on demand
• Text chat
• Video chat

Quick Start

• Clone this repo via git clone git@github.com:howardchung/watchparty.git
• Install npm dependencies for the project via npm install
• Start the server via npm run dev
  • Defaults to port 8080, customize with PORT env var
  • Set SSL_KEY_FILE and SSL_CRT_FILE for HTTPS.
• Start the React application in a separate shell and port via npm run ui
  • Point to server using VITE_SERVER_HOST env var if you customized it above
  • Set SSL_KEY_FILE and SSL_CRT_FILE for HTTPS.
  • HTTPS is required by the browser for some WebRTC features (camera, etc.)
• Duplicate the .env.example file
• Rename it to .env
• Add config for the features you want as described in the advanced setup

Advanced Setup (optional)

All of these are optional and the application should work without them. Some functionality may be missing.

YouTube API (video search)

This project uses the YouTube API for video search, which requires an API key. You can get one from Google here.

Without an API key you won't be able to search for videos via the searchbox.

After creating a YouTube Data API V3 access, you can create an API key which you can add to your environment variables by copying the .env.example, renaming it to .env and adding the key to the YOUTUBE_API_KEY variable.

After that restart your server to enable the YouTube API access on your server.

Firebase Config (user authentication)

This project uses Firebase for authentication. This is used for user login, account management, subscriptions, and handling some features like room locking/permanence.

To set up, create a new Firebase app (or reuse an old one) from here. After creating an application, click on the settings cog icon in the left menu next to "Project overview" and click on project settings. From there, scroll down, create a web application and copy the Firebase SDK configuration snippet JSON data.

Next, you have to stringify it: JSON.stringify(PASTE_CONFIG_HERE) in your browser console, then add it to VITE_FIREBASE_CONFIG in your .env file.

For server verification of accounts you'll also need FIREBASE_ADMIN_SDK_CONFIG, which you should do the same steps for.

Virtual Browser Setup

This project supports creating virtual browsers (using https://github.com/m1k1o/neko) either on a cloud provider or with Docker containers. For development, Docker is easiest.

• Install Docker: curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com | sh
• Make sure you have an SSH key pair set up on the server (id_rsa in ~/.ssh directory), if not, use ssh-keygen.
• Configure DOCKER_VM_HOST_SSH_USER if root is not the correct user
• Note: If your web client is not running on the same physical machine as the server, you will also need to configure DOCKER_VM_HOST to a publically-resolvable value (i.e. not localhost)
• If you want to run managed instance pools (whether on cloud or with Docker), configure VM_MANAGER_CONFIG and run the vmWorker service.

Room Persistence

• Configure Postgres by adding DATABASE_URL to your .env file and then setting up the database schema
• This allows rooms to persist between server restarts

Tech

• React
• TypeScript
• Node.js
• Redis
• PostgreSQL
• Docker