Soebb / chief-vid

Simple website for videos playing hosted videos

ChiefVideo

Simple website for videos playing hosted videos

Developing

Native

Simple development HTTP server

We can provide a simple http server by creating a video directory, changing into this directory and call python3 -m http.server.

Simple flask server

First install the requirements with pip3 install -r requirements.txt in the app directory. By running python3 -m flask run we can start a simple development server for the web app.

Docker

docker build -t boehmls/chief-video:latest .
docker run --rm --it -v <VIDEO_PATH>:/app/videos -p <PORT>:5000 -e "VIDEO_URL=<VIDEO_URL>" boehmls/chief-video:latest

Deploying

The docker deployment is recommended.

Native

The following assumes a linux server with systemd, nginx and python3 installed. First you have to adapt the chief-video.server and chief-video.conf to your liking and update paths as neccecary.

pip3 install gunicorn
sudo ln -s ./chief-video.service /etc/systemd/system/chief-video.service
sudo daemon-reload
sudo ln -s ./chief-video.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/chief-video.conf
sudo systemctl start chief-video
sudo systemctl reload nginx

Docker

docker pull boehmls/chief-video:latest
docker run --name chief-video -v <VIDEO_PATH>:/app/videos -p <PORT>:5000 --env-file <ENV_FILE>  boehmls/chief-video:latest

where <VIDEO_PATH> is the absolute path to the video directory. The <PORT> can be any of your choice. Note that the port is only for the docker process running on the localhost. You still have to forward it using a reverse proxy like nginx. Then we need to pass the environment variables. We can do this by hand or use an .env file like <ENV_FILE>.

Directory

The video directory has to be structured as follows:

. // video root
|- Category1
|  |- Video1
|  |- Video2
|- Category2
|  |- Video1
|  |- Video2
|- ...

Environment Variables

• VIDEO_PATH: the (absolute) path on the server where the videos are located. Default ./videos
• VIDEO_URL: the base url to videos. Since the flask app does not provide the videos themselves, we need another HTTP server to do this job. This variable needs to provide the resources in the same tree structure as presented in the directory section. Either has to be a relative path or a full url (including the "http://")
• SECRET_KEY: required by flask to use secure sessions
• LOGIN_PASSWORD: password for the website
• VIDEO_USERNAME and VIDEO_PASSWORD: are the http basic auth information for the video streaming server. Can be omitted if not neccecary

Roadmap

• better authentication (not just basic http)
• search functionality
• option to setup without a website password
• Live streaming
• video upload (in website)
• configuration files (to possibly exclude some files or set other information)
• allowing to use a remote vide directory
• show videolength (using ffmpeg - ffprobe)
• converter for new video files (as not all video formats are supported in every browser)
• update design