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
• 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 PORT=8080 npm run dev
  • Defaults to port 8080, customize with PORT env var
  • Run using self-signed HTTPS cert with HTTPS=true. This is needed for some WebRTC features (camera, etc.)
• Start the React application in a separate shell and port via PORT=3000 npm run start
  • Point to server using REACT_APP_SERVER_HOST env var if you customized it above
  • Run using self-signed HTTPS cert with HTTPS=true. This is needed 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 REACT_APP_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 by spawning Docker containers on the development server. For local development, the Docker on local approach is preferred.

• 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)
• Add DOCKER_VM_HOST=localhost to your .env file (can substitute localhost for a public hostname)
• Add NODE_ENV=development to .env to enable create-on-demand behavior for VMs
• Configure Redis by adding REDIS_URL to your .env file (Redis is required for virtual browser management)

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
• Docker