Video Watch Party App

Chat with your friends while watching a video together!

This is a video app, which lets people talk via video conferencing, and when ready, the moderator can switch to "Watch Party" mode and share their screen. The "Watch Party" mode will share the moderator's screen, put the site into dark mode and disable everyone's microphones and cameras. Participants can continue to chat via text.

Requirements
Installation
Usage
- Customizing The App
- Deploying to Heroku
License

Requirements

This app requires Ruby v2.5 or greater and Rails 6.0 or greater.

Installation

Once you clone the repository, first change into the directory and execute the following commands in your terminal:

$ bundle install
$ yarn install
$ rake db:migrate

Lastly, rename the .env.sample file to .env.

Usage

To use this app you must sign up for an account with the Vonage Video API. Once you have an account, you can create a new video project. That project will assign you a project level API key and secret. Copy those values into your .env file in the API_KEY and API_SECRET parameters, respectively.

You also must define a moderator name, which will be used to provide one user with moderator privileges. Those privileges include the ability to switch between video chat and screen share modes. You can define that name in the .env file within the MODERATOR_NAME value.

Lastly, you must set a PARTY_PASSWORD in your environment variables. This password will be used to allow participants into the application. You can define that value in the .env file within the PARTY_PASSWORD key.

Once you have done that, you can start your app locally by running bundle exec rails s from the command line and navigate to localhost:3000 in your web browser.

Customizing the App

The app reads from /config/site_info.yml to gather data such as the website title and the various textual elements of the site. This is entirely customizable.

To edit the data open up /config/site_info.yml in your code editor. The following options are available:

lang: # The ISO 2 letter language code of the site, for example en for American English or he for Hebrew
lang_direction: # The language direction of the text, values can be either rtl or ltr
landing_page:
  welcome_message:
    text: # The landing page welcome message, any string of text
  name_form:
    text: # The text in the form asking for the name of the participant, any string of text
    name_placeholder_text: # The placeholder for the name text field, any string of text
    password_placeholder_text: # The placeholder for the password text field, any string of text
    submit_button_text: # The text for the name form submit button, any string of text
navbar:
  title:
    text: # The title in the navigation bar, any string of text
text_chat:
  submit_button_text: # The text for the chat form submit button, any string of text
  placeholder_text: # The placeholder text for the chat form text form, any string of text

If you do not edit the data in the site_info.yml, the defaults in the file in this repository will be rendered.

Deploying to Heroku

You can deploy the application directly from this GitHub repository by clicking on the Deploy to Heroku button at the top of this README. Once you do that you still must set your Vonage OpenTok API credentials and information in Heroku. You can either do so at the time you are initializing your application after you have the clicked the Deploy to Heroku button above, or after from within the Heroku Dashboard.

After you have clicked the above Deploy to Heroku button, you will see three config vars in the Heroku deployment settings. Add your Vonage OpenTok API credentials and moderator name in the appropriate value box for each key before clicking the final Deploy app button. This will ensure your application is deployed to Heroku with your information.

Alternatively, you can do so from with your Heroku Dashboard's application settings by managing the config vars for your Video Watch Party app after deploying. You will need to add the four environment variables: OPENTOK_API_KEY, OPENTOK_API_SECRET, MODERATOR_NAME, PARTY_PASSWORD.

License

This library is released under the MIT License

nexmo-community / rails-video-watch-party-app

readme