distra

distra is a free and open source video sharing platform that prioritizes free access and cutting-edge technology to provide a unique and user-friendly experience for sharing, viewing, and interacting with video content.

Local development or self-hosting

Prerequisites

You'll need the following to run your own distra instance:

• Node.js 18.x or later
• pnpm (as the package manager)
• A running PostgreSQL database (you can use Docker to run one)
• A running MinIO instance (you can use Docker to run one)

Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/distralive/distra && cd distra

Install the dependencies

pnpm i

Copy the .env.example file

cp .env.example .env

Initializing the database

If you haven't setup a PostgreSQL instance, set it up on your local machine directly, or with Docker.

Setting up with Docker (recommended)

1. Pull the postgres image.

docker pull postgres

2. Run an instance.

docker run --name distra-db -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=my-secret-pw -p 5432:5432 -d postgres

3. Add a DATABASE_URL environment variable. The value of the variable should be something like postgres://postgres:my-secret-pw@localhost:5432/postgres

4. Migrate the schema to the database.

pnpm db:push

Setup NextAuth.js

1. Create a secret for NextAuth.js.

Generate a secret with:

openssl rand -base64 32

The output should be copied to .env.

2. Add GitHub OAuth secrets.

Get the secrets by creating a new OAuth application, and copy and paste the values on the .env file.

Initializing MinIO

You can follow the docs to setup a MinIO instance.

After that, the endpoint, the access key and the secret key is copied to the .env file. By default MinIO's endpoint is http://localhost:9000.

Then, you open up http://localhost:9000 or whatever your MinIO endpoint is on the browser. Then, you sign into it with the access key and the secret key. And then, you create 3 buckets that are called distra-videos, distra-private-videos, and distra-thumbnails respectively.

Run a development server

To run a development server, run:

pnpm dev

Build to production

To create a production build, run:

pnpm build

After that, to start the production build, run:

pnpm start

Deploying the app

If you'd choose to deploy your own instance somewhere, we would recommend these:

• Vercel for running the Next.js app
• Neon for running the database, based on PostgreSQL
• Amazon S3 for running the object storage, which hosts the videos and thumbnails
  • Cloudflare R2 may work, but since this app uses presigned POST urls for uploads, which isn't supported by it, we wouldn't recommend this
• Or just deploy it on a VPS provider you like and run everything on it. Guide is provided above.

note: We are not sponsored/endorsed by any of these sites.

Hosted instances

These are hosted instances of distra to try out.

Country	Link to instance	Cloudflare enabled	Is up?
🇺🇸	https://distra.ihatethedemonkahl.com/	✅	❌