This repository includes a couple variations of websocket servers written in Node.js.
The included websocket server scripts are designed to allow self-hosting of some of the apps and services provided by Steve Seguin, including caption.ninja, vdo.ninja, chat.overlay.ninja, and more.
The basic websocket server, server.js, can be used with a number of apps provided by Steve Seguin, including vdo.ninja, caption.ninja, chat.overlay.ninja, and more.
Due to the simplicity and generic nature of its basic fan-out design, it's really only suitable for personal or private use, as published data is broadcasted to everyone connected.
VDO.Ninja is intentionally designed to work with a basic websocket server, due to a core tenant of the VDO.Ninja's design philosophy being: "be as serverless as possible". This develoment mindset allows VDO.Ninja to not only have a low-cost to operate, but also allows it to work over public blockchain networks, RabbitMQ, IRC chat rooms, and probably even Twitter. It's a good idea to use a secure password in such cases though, to ensure message encryption over public channels.
That said, it's fairly easy to optimize the message routing to get better performance and security when using VDO.Ninja. To demonstrate this, I've also included in this repository an optimized version of the websocket server (vdoninja.js), specifically designed to fill the role of a VDO.Ninja handshake server. Either the basic or this optimized version would work as a VDO.Ninja handshake server, however the optimized version can handle more clients and has better routing isolation.
You can use services like piesocket.com or Cloudflare workers, instead of self-hosting a websocket server as well. Just pointing that out, as self-hosting servers is a responsibility..
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install nodejs -y
sudo apt-get install npm -y
sudo npm install express
sudo npm install ws
sudo npm install fs
You will very likely also require SSL, so either use something like Cloudflare SSL, or grab a self-hosted SSL certificate. Certbot is a free way to get SSL certificates that you need to renewal every 90-days, and the setup for that is as follows:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:certbot/certbot
sudo apt-get install certbot -y
sudo certbot certonly // register your domain
I'm not going to detail the SSL setup process much, but once you have your certificate, you can update the server script to point to your certificate.
As well, you will probably need a domain name in most cases, so perhaps consider a cloud host that offers a server hostname or be prepared to spend a few dollars on a domain name. (namescheap.com has them for as low as $2)
In the case of an offline deployment, you may need self-signed certicates, but that topic is outside the scope of this guide.
sudo nodejs server.js // port 443 needs to be open. THIS STARTS THE SERVER
But you'll probably want to create a service and have the script auto start on system load or restart on a crash.
To run the VDO.Ninja optimized version manually,
sudo nodejs vdoninja.js // port 443 needs to be open. THIS STARTS THE SERVER
Whether you use the optimized version or not, if using this with a self-hosted version of VDO.Ninja, you'll need to update the index.html of your VDO.Ninja installation with the WSS connection details.
Specially, you'll need to enable the customWSS mode and set the wss server address to whatever you setup, such as with:
session.wss = "wss://wss.contribute.cam:443";
session.customWSS = true;
You can also just specify the new WSS URL as a URL parameter, such as:
https://vdo.ninja?wss=wss://yourdomain.com
Use AWS SAM to deploy. Attempts have been made to keep resources limited to the free tier, but some AWS costs may still be incurred especially with heavy or unexpected usage.
Install node_modules in each lambda function (onconnect, ondisconnect, sendmessage) with npm install.
Use sam deploy -g and pass in a valid domain name for the WSS server. This will create a custom domain and certificate that will need to be DNS validated.
No guarentee is made on security, privacy, support, or reliability of these scripts; nor anything else for that matter. You're on your own if you choose to go this path.
Good luck!