Owncast

Owncast is a free and open source live video and web chat server for use with existing popular broadcasting software.

Dependencies

This service requires the following other services:

a Traefik reverse-proxy server

Configuration

To enable this service, add the following configuration to your vars.yml file and re-run the installation process:

########################################################################
#                                                                      #
# owncast                                                            #
#                                                                      #
########################################################################

owncast_enabled: true

owncast_hostname: live.example.com
owncast_path_prefix: /owncast
########################################################################
#                                                                      #
# /owncast                                                           #
#                                                                      #
########################################################################

URL

In the example configuration above, we configure the service to be hosted at https://mash.example.com/owncast.

You can remove the owncast_path_prefix variable definition, to make it default to /, so that the service is served at https://mash.example.com/.

Authentication

You can log in with any of the Basic Auth credentials defined in owncast_basicauth_credentials. owncast is not a multi-user system, so whichever user you authenticate with, you'd ultimately end up looking at the same shared system.

Authentication is done at the reverse-proxy level (Traefik), so upon logging in, owncast will show you scary warnings about no GUI password being set. You should ignore these warnings.

You can hide the warning permanently by going to Actions -> Advanced -> GUI section -> checking the Insecure Admin Access checkbox.

Networking

By default, the following ports will be exposed by the container on all network interfaces:

22000 over TCP, controlled by owncast_container_sync_tcp_bind_port - used for TCP based sync protocol traffic
22000 over UDP, controlled by owncast_container_sync_udp_bind_port - used for QUIC based sync protocol traffic
21027 over UDP, controlled by owncast_container_local_discovery_udp_bind_port - used for discovery broadcasts on IPv4 and multicasts on IPv6

Docker automatically opens these ports in the server's firewall, so you likely don't need to do anything. If you use another firewall in front of the server, you may need to adjust it.

To learn more, see the upstream Firewall documentation.

Configuration & Data

The owncast configuration (stored in owncast_config_path on the host) is mounted to the /var/owncast directory in the container. By default, owncast will create a default Sync directory underneath. We advise that you don't use this Sync directory and use the data directory (discussed below).

As mentioned above, the data directory (stored in owncast_data_path on the host) is mounted to the /data directory in the container. We advise that you put data files underneath /data when you start using owncast.

If you'd like to mount additional directories into the container, look into the owncast_container_additional_volumes variable part of the ansible-role-owncast role's defaults/main.yml file.

Usage

After installation, you can go to the owncast URL, as defined in owncast_hostname and owncast_path_prefix.

As mentioned in Configuration & Data above, you should:

get rid of the Default Folder directory that was automatically created in /var/owncast/Sync
change the default data directory, by going to Actions -> Settings -> General tab -> Edit Folder Defaults and changing Folder Path to /data

As mentioned in Authentication above, you'd probably wish to permanently disable the "no GUI password set" security warnings as described there.

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