livekit-server

README

LiveKit - Open source, distributed video/audio rooms over WebRTC

LiveKit is an open source project that provides scalable, multi-user conferencing over WebRTC. It's designed to give you everything you need to build real time video/audio capabilities in your applications.

Features

• Horizontally scalable WebRTC Selective Forwarding Unit (SFU)
• Modern, full-featured client SDKs for JS, iOS, Android, and Flutter
• Built for production - JWT authentication and server APIs
• Robust networking & connectivity, over UDP & TCP
• Easy to deploy - pure Go & single binary
• Advanced features - speaker detection, simulcast, selective subscription, moderation APIs, and webhooks.

Documentation & Guides

Docs & Guides at: https://docs.livekit.io

Try it live

Head to our playground and give it a spin. Build a Zoom-like conferencing app in under 100 lines of code!

SDKs & Tools

Client SDKs:

• Javascript (docs)
• React
• iOS - Swift (docs)
• Android - Kotlin (docs)
• Flutter (docs)

Server SDKs:

• Javascript (docs)
• Go (docs)

Tools:

• livekit-cli
• chrometester

Installing

From source

Pre-requisites:

• Go 1.15+ is installed
• GOPATH/bin is in your PATH

Then run

git clone https://github.com/livekit/livekit-server
cd livekit-server
./bootstrap.sh
mage

Docker

LiveKit is published to Docker Hub under livekit/livekit-server

Running

Creating API keys

LiveKit utilizes JWT based access tokens for authentication to all of its APIs. Because of this, the server needs a list of valid API keys and secrets to validate the provided tokens. For more, see Access Tokens guide.

Generate API key/secret pairs with:

./bin/livekit-server generate-keys

or

docker run --rm livekit/livekit-server generate-keys

Store the generate keys in a YAML file like:

APIwLeah7g4fuLYDYAJeaKsSE: 8nTlwISkb-63DPP7OH4e.nw.J44JjicvZDiz8J59EoQ+

Starting the server

In development mode, LiveKit has no external dependencies. You can start LiveKit by passing it the API keys it should use in LIVEKIT_KEYS. LiveKit could also use a config file or config environment variable LIVEKIT_CONFIG

LIVEKIT_KEYS="<key>: <secret>" ./bin/livekit-server --dev

or

docker run --rm \
  -p 7880:7880 \
  -p 7881:7881 \
  -p 7882:7882/udp \
  -e LIVEKIT_KEYS="<key>: <secret>" \
  livekit/livekit-server \
  --dev \
  --node-ip=<machine-ip>

When running with docker, --node-ip needs to be set to your machine's IP address. If the service is to be exposed to public internet, this should the machine's public IP.

The --dev flag turns on log verbosity to make it easier for local debugging/development

Creating a JWT token

To create a join token for clients, livekit-server provides a convenient subcommand to create a development token. This token has an expiration of a month, which is useful for development & testing, but not appropriate for production use.

./bin/livekit-server --key-file <path/to/keyfile> create-join-token --room "myroom" --identity "myidentity"

Sample client

To test your server, you can use our example web client (built with our React component)

Enter generated access token and you are connected to a room!

Deploying for production

LiveKit is deployable to any environment that supports docker, including Kubernetes and Amazon ECS.

See deployment docs at https://docs.livekit.io/guides/deploy

Contributing

We welcome your contributions to make LiveKit better! Please join us on Slack to discuss your ideas and/or submit PRs.

License

LiveKit server is licensed under Apache License v2.0.