Vroxy

Self-hosted light-weight server proxy for YoutubeDL, originally designed for use in VRChat.

Currently in alpha.

Usage

Access the url via https://mydomain/?url=https://youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID to receive a 307 redirect to the direct link video url.

Optional parameters

• f: Specific format id for the given url that is desired. This is something that is looked up ahead of time via manually checking --list-formats in ytdl.
• s: Custom sort order for ytdl to determine what it thinks is 'best'. Sort order options can be found Here
• m: Specific presets for sort order options
  • 0 - aka "hasvid,hasaud,res:1440" for decent sized media with audio+video, generally compatible with all platforms
  • 1 - aka "hasvid,hasaud,res" for sort preferring audio+video with the highest quality
  • 2 - aka "hasvid,hasaud,+res" for sort preferring audio+video with the lowest quality
  • 3 - aka "hasvid,res,codec:vp9" for sort preferring highest quality with priority on VP9 codec for platform compatibility
  • 4 - aka "hasvid,res" for sort preferring highest quality without concern for codec or audio

If you specified authorization tokens in your configuration, use one of the following to authorize yourself:

• Send an authorization header: Authorization: Bearer <your token>.
• Use the ?token=<your token> query parameter.

Configuration

Use the following environment variables to configure the server.

Whitelist file

You may provide a whitelist file path via VROXY_WHITELIST. This is a text file where each line is a domain pattern to whitelist. You may specify:

• Fully qualified domains: [subdomain.]domain.tld
• Wildcard subdomains: *.domain.tld
• Use # to add comments.

We include an example config which attempts to match the VRChat Video Player Whitelist.

Deployment

Prerequisites:

• Ensure you have a VPS or better with a linux OS on it (debian is recommended). You will need to be able to run commands with escalated privilege.
• Ensure you have a domain name setup correctly with the desired DNS A entry pointing to your server's public IP address.

Debian/Ubuntu Setup:

Pull the repo's install script and run it:

curl -o vroxy_install.sh https://raw.githubusercontent.com/techanon/vroxy/master/vroxy_install_deb.sh\
  && sudo bash ./vroxy_install.sh

• This will pull in all dependencies and setup the nginx reverse proxy and SSL certs for you.
• The script will use /var/vroxy as the install folder by default, but you can specify another location if you wish.
• If running on an OS without the sudo command, you will either need to login as root su - or install sudo and add yourself as a sudo user.

After install

• Run the reload script to update and (re)start the service: bash /var/vroxy/vroxy_reload.sh
• You can examine the service log with: tmux a -t vroxy
• Exit tmux with CTRL+B followed by the D key.

Generic Setup:

• Setup a public facing server on your VPS or whatever.
  • This requires something like Apache or Nginx and some SSL cert assigned (using LetsEncrypt's certbot tool is the recommended option)
  • Quest requires HTTPS, so the SSL cert is a must.
• Install python3 (make sure the pip tool is also installed)
• Clone this repo to the server at your desired file path. /var/vroxy is recommended.
• Navigate your terminal to the given folder that Vroxy was cloned into.
• Install the dependant packages for python via python3 -m pip install -U yt-dlp aiohttp
• Copy example.ini to settings.ini and change the settings as you need
• Run the server via python3 /path/to/repo/vroxy.py
  • You may want to consider a terminal multiplexer (like tmux) to run the service without needing to be connected to the terminal.

Docker deployment

In general you can deploy ghcr.io/techanon/vroxy:dev to any platform that supports running docker containers.

VPS

On a bare VPS with Docker and docker-compose installed:

1. Clone the repo
2. Copy example.ini to setup.ini and fill in the proper values

3. docker-compose up -d

Google Cloud Platform: Cloud Run

1. Push your docker container to Google Cloud Registry or use the official one:
2. All the default settings should just work. But you might want to take care to look at the following settings:
   • Set maximum replicas to 1
   • Allow all traffic
   • Allow unauthenticated invocations
3. After a short initialization time, you should have a public service up and running

Development

Docker development

• Ensure you have Docker installed.
• Install docker-compose
• Install make

Using make is optional if you already know how to use docker-compose.

To build the docker containers:

make

Run the tests:

make test

make test-e2e

To launch a shell inside the dev container:

make sh

To run the local development server:

docker-compose up