Video chat for your own web server

Valentin Giselbrecht — Fri, 29 Jan 2021 14:48:14 +0000

Features

Open-Source
For small groups
Browser based
Only peer-to-peer connections
Firebase is only used for signaling
No media server
Screen sharing
Text-Chat with images
Change of video and microphone source
Multilingual (English and German)
Mobile friendly

Demo

The characters after the hashtag define the room, if no hashtag is selected, the create room dialog is displayed.

For example, all visitors with a link to https://chat.gise.at/#roulette-chat enter into a room and can communicate with each other there.

Therefore simply forward the current URL to invite others.

Installation

This video chat is made to install it on an own webserver.
The webserver need no server-side programming language, only a free firebase project is required.

Prerequisites

Local development environment
- Git
- Node.js
- npm
Server
- nginx or apache

Configuration

Load code and dependencies in your local development environment:

git clone https://github.com/vgiselbrecht/chat.git chat
cd chat
npm install
cp src/config.tmp.json src/config.json

For signaling you need a free Firebase Project with anonymous authentication and realtime database.

Copy the firebase configuration to the src/config.json file in exchangeServices/firebase.

{
    "meta": {
        "title": "Video Chat",
        "description": "Open-Source video chat based on WebRTC and Firebase.",
        "keywords": "chat, webrtc, video-call, video-chat",
        "image": ""
    },
    "privacy": {
        "firebaseAnalytics": 0,
        "imprint": "",
        "gdpr": ""
    },
    "exchangeServices": { 
        "firebase": {
            "apiKey": "",
            "authDomain": "",
            "databaseURL": "",
            "projectId": "",
            "storageBucket": "",
            "messagingSenderId": "",
            "appId": "",
            "measurementId": ""
        }
    },
    "communication": {
        "webrtc": {
            "iceServers": [
                {"urls": "stun:stun.services.mozilla.com"}, 
                {"urls": "stun:stun.l.google.com:19302"}
            ]
        }
    }
}

Additional STUN / TURN Server can also be added in communication/webrtc/iceServers. To use this video chat behind some Firewalls and NATs, you need a TURN server.

List of free STUN and TURN Server

Deploy video chat for development

grunt deploy

Add content from dist directory to the document root of your local webserver.

Deploy video chat for production

grunt deploy --target=production

Copy content from dist directory to your webserver.

Development

grunt watch

Change the compiled code in dist directory after saving a project file.
Ideally the dist directory is the document root of a local webserver like nginx or apache.

More information and source code on GitHub.

DEV Community: Valentin Giselbrecht