MERN Video Streaming Project

I am writing a full in-depth explanation in my medium.com page. Please visit Build a MERN based video hosting and sharing system to understand the whole architecture and step by step instructions.

Overview

MERN Video Streaming is a cutting-edge, open-source platform for video streaming, offering a comprehensive, full-stack solution utilizing the latest MERN stack technologies. With MERN Video Streaming, users can easily upload, manage, and stream videos on demand, providing a seamless experience. This project features a video processing capability that provides real-time notifications upon completion.

The backend is comprised of three services, utilizing Redis messaging for communication. These include an API server, a video conversion service, and an HTTP server serving HLS video files. On the client side, the project uses create-react-app and MUI library, along with socket.io-client and React Context.

Architecture

Backend Services

API Server

The API server is an Expressjs app that uses Joi, Multer, BullMQ, Socket.io, and MongoDB driver. The server communicates with Redis to process and store data, and uses MongoDB as the primary database. The database and Redis are spun up via the docker-compose command.

Video Conversion Service

The video conversion service is a node process that is responsible for converting videos and communicating with Redis via the BullMQ library. The service is not exposed to any HTTP port.

HTTP Server

The HTTP server is a plain and simple server that serves HLS video files.

Frontend app

The client app is based on create-react-app and MUI library. It uses socket.io-client and React Context to communicate with the API server and display the video content.

Prerequisites

To get started with MERN Video Streaming, you will need to have the following software installed on your local machine:

• Node.js
• Docker
• Docker Compose

Built with Open-Source Technologies

MERN Video Streaming has been built with the following open-source technologies:

• MongoDB - A document-based database used to store user and video data
• Express - A Node.js web application framework used for the server-side of the application
• React - A JavaScript library for building user interfaces used for the client-side of the application
• Node.js - A JavaScript runtime environment used to run the server-side code

Installation

To run the project locally, follow these steps:

1. Clone the repository

git clone [email protected]:foyzulkarim/mern-video-streaming.git

2. Install dependencies using npm

2.1 Server dependencies

cd server
npm install

2.2 Client dependencies

cd client
yarn

3. Start the database and Redis

Navigate to the server directory and then run docker-compose up command like below. It will spin up the databases as daemon mode.

cd server
docker-compose up -d
or
npm run db

Otherwise the updated npm run start script will start the database and web servers altogether.

4. Start the application

4.1 Create .env file

Create a .env file inside server directory and copy paste all the key-values from .env.template file.

4.2 Create uploads directory

This will create uploads directory inside server directory.

npm i -g zx
npm run init-directories

4.3 Set the value of API_SERVER & VIDEO_SERVER for localhost

To run this project locally just set http://localhost:4000 as API_SERVER and http://localhost:4001 as VIDEO_SERVER in client/src/constants.js.

Make sure your server(server/src/server.js) running on port 4000 and your video-server(server/src/video-server.js) running on port 4001

4.4 Start the server

This will start all the backend services and database together.

cd server
npm run start

4.5 Start the client

cd client
yarn start

5. Usage

You can now access the application at http://localhost:3000.

Special note: Video folder structures

To upload the videos and serve them from server's folder we need to have below folder structure.

Contributing to MERN Video Streaming

MERN Video Streaming is an open-source project and we welcome contributions from the community. If you would like to contribute to the project, please refer to the CONTRIBUTING.md file for guidelines.

License

MERN Video Streaming is licensed under the MIT License. Please see the LICENSE file for more information.

Note

Before running the above commands, make sure that you have Docker and Node.js installed on your machine.

This readme file is not finished yet. I will update it as I go along with the project. Thanks.