Notes on Installing PeerTube on Reclaim Cloud

Most of last week was eaten up by playing with PeerTube on Reclaim Cloud. Tim installed ds106.tv on a VPS through Reclaim Cloud following this guide, and he said it wasn’t too bad, just a lot of copying and pasting of commands. He also figured out how to store all the videos and serve them through Amazon’s S3 according to these Nginx rules, which is quite slick.

I, on the other hand, went the Docker route and documented that process already on the Reclaim Hosting community forums. I ran into some issues with the CLI  tools working with my instance (which led to my re-installing PeerTube at least once) which was a bummer for me because the CLI tools enable you to migrate entire YouTube or Vimeo channels (including metadata) in one fell swoop. I kept getting  413 “Payload Too Large” errors when videos over 95 MB were uploaded. It was frustrating. I even posted an issue to the PeerTube Github, but it turns out the Proxied DNS status through Cloudflare was causing the error. Took me longer than I care to admit to figure that out, but once I did all my videos from Vimeo came over easy. So, today’s pro-tip is if you are running your DNS through Cloudflare and using PeerTube’s CLI Tools, make sure the main domain is not proxied, you want DNS Only.

I want to spend a moment just recording my process with the CLI Tools element of PeerTube because it is a separate setup than the actual PeerTube server. You need to install Node.js version 10.22.1 using NVM, the latest version of the package management tool Yarnffmpeg, and Git. All the links in the previous sentence are to resources for Ubuntu 18.04 which is the VPS I used to create a separate bavatube CLI server. It is far more practical to have these running on your desktop/laptop, and to do that I used the Homebrew package manager for the Mac. I will avoid trying to link to the resources given it is a rabbit hole, but in short I installed Node.js version 10.21.1 on my Mac using NVM as well as the latest version of Yarn.  I ran into issues with the following error:

Error on CLI video Import: "ENOENT: no such file or directory,"

This was a result of my not having ffmpeg installed on my laptop, so learn from my mistakes. You can install ffmpeg using Homebrew as well, which is nice. So, I now have the CLI for PeerTube both running on my laptop as well as on a VPS on Reclaim Cloud. The latter was a result of the former not working, but it has been convenient for testing so keeping it for a bit. You can almost track my entire process via the PeerTube tag on my Pinboard given I have been using social bookmarking a lot as of late, and it is super useful for keeping track of all the sites I use to figure something out.

node dist/server/tools/peertube-import-videos.js -u 'https://bava.tv' -U 'username' --password 'mypassword' --target-url 'https://vimeo.com/user2190323'

Once I had it working the above command effectively copied every pubic video from my Vimeo account into bava.tv rather quickly using the youtube-dl codebase, which right now is the greatest command ever.

Anyway, consider this post simply notes that I wanted to get down here before I lost track of my process. Now for the one-click installer of PeerTube on Reclaim Cloud…YEAH!

This entry was posted in bava.tv, ds106tv, ds206.video, video and tagged , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

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