Fork me on GitHub
Mediasnake

Installation

Mediasnake is a Django application written in Python. There are many ways to serve it. Here, we describe how to do it on Debian-based Linux systems, using NGINX or Apache as the web server.

Unpacking

First, select a location where you want to put the code. It does not matter much where it is, but it must NOT be inside the web root of your web server. Below, we assume you will install the application under: /srv/mediasnake.

Unpack the source package there. Now, under /srv/mediasnake you should have:

/srv/mediasnake
    bootstrap.py
    config.ini.example
    data/
    docs/
    manage.py
    mediasnake/
    mediasnakefiles/
    ...

Prerequisites

If you are using Apache:

apt-get install python-virtualenv ffmpegthumbnailer libapache2-mod-wsgi

If you are using NGINX + uWSGI + Supervisord:

apt-get install python-virtualenv ffmpegthumbnailer supervisor uwsgi-plugin-python

If you want something else, take a look at https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.5/howto/deployment/

Configuration

Go to /srv/mediasnake/ and copy config.ini.example to config.ini.

Change the following options:

url_prefix = /mediasnake
video_dirs = "/home/data/My Videos", "/home/data/More of My Videos"
hostnames = "localhost", "127.0.0.1", "mysite.com"

Of course, choose the above two video directories as you like. The url_prefix above is something that needs to match your web server configuration, see below. The hostnames need to match the names of your virtual hosts.

File permissions

Set the file permissions so that the web and app servers can access the data files:

mkdir env
chmod a+rX -R /srv/mediasnake/
chgrp www-data -R data/ env/
chmod ug=rwX,o= -R data/ env/

Moreover, you need to make sure the www-data user or group can actually read the video files that you plan to serve.

Initialization

Run:

sudo -u www-data python bootstrap.py

This will download and install all dependencies into a directory env/, and ask you to create a user account and a password.

The system uses a Sqlite database stored in the data/ directory.

Web server configuration (Apache)

First enable the Apache WSGI module:

a2enmod wsgi

Then write an Apache configuration file /etc/apache2/conf.d/mediasnake:

Alias /mediasnake/static /srv/mediasnake/data/static

<Directory /srv/mediasnake/data/static>
    Order deny,allow
    Allow from all
    AllowOverride None
</Directory>

WSGIScriptAlias /mediasnake /srv/mediasnake/mediasnake/wsgi.py
WSGIPythonHome /srv/mediasnake/env
WSGIPythonPath /srv/mediasnake

<Directory /srv/mediasnake/mediasnake>
    <Files wsgi.py>
        Order deny,allow
        Allow from all
    </Files>
</Directory>

You can also find this example file under in the docs/examples/ directory.

If you have multiple virtual hosts, you may want to drop the configuration into only one of them instead.

Now, do:

/etc/init.d/apache reload

This also needs to be done after every time you change config.ini.

You should be able to browse to http://yoursite/mediasnake/ There, log in, and go to the admin tab. Press “Rescan for Videos” and wait — this may take some time as it generates all video thumbnails at once. After that, you should be all set!

Web server configuration (NGINX)

This assumes you understand how NGINX configuration in general works.

A suitable NGINX + uWSGI configuration for Mediasnake looks like this:

location /mediasnake/static/ {
    try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
    alias /srv/mediasnake/data/static/;
}

location /mediasnake/streaming/ {
    internal;
    alias /srv/mediasnake/data/streaming/;
}

location /mediasnake/ {
    include /etc/nginx/uwsgi_params;
    uwsgi_param SCRIPT_NAME /mediasnake;
    uwsgi_modifier1 30;
    uwsgi_pass unix:/srv/mediasnake/data/uwsgi.sock;
}

You can now set file_serving = nginx in config.ini to hand off file streaming to NGINX. Finally, do:

/etc/init.d/nginx reload

As you know, NGINX expects app servers to run as separate processes. This is conveniently done by using e.g. supervisord. We only need to create a configuration file /etc/supervisor/conf.d/mediasnake.conf:

[program:mediasnake]
command = uwsgi_python -H env --socket data/uwsgi.sock --mount=/mediasnake=mediasnake/wsgi.py -M -p 4
directory = /srv/mediasnake
user = www-data

This spawns 4 worker processes.

Now do:

/etc/init.d/supervisor stop
/etc/init.d/supervisor start
supervisorctl

The supervisorctl should indicate the process is now running. The site should now be ready to go.

Streaming on HTTP, serving on HTTPS

It turns out that SSL, self-signed certificates in particular, cause major pain for would-be player applications. It then makes sense to stream the video content over plain HTTP.

The security implications of this are not extremely bad:

  • Authentication information is not sent over HTTP.
  • The streaming URL is locked to a single IP address.
  • It is only valid for a couple of hours.
  • The URL address does not contain information about the file name.
  • It is not possible to browse the collection via HTTP.

A man-in-the-middle party snooping on you (e.g., someone on your local network, or your ISP or government) will mostly find out that you watched some video. Unless they act fast or record ALL network traffic, they don’t get much wiser than that.

It is now assumed that you have followed the above instructions, and configured the service to go through a SSL enabled virtual host.

We also assume that you have a second virtual host for serving HTTP. If not, you need to add it.

The configuration for this case is as follows: first change in your config.ini:

http_streaming_address = http://mysite.com:80/

where the site and the port number correspond to your HTTP virtual host.

You should now configure Mediasnake on the HTTP virtual host. The configuration goes exactly the same as on the other virtual host.

When http_streaming_address is set in the configuration file, Mediasnake will only serve streaming tickets if it notices the virtual host doesn’t have SSL. Moreover, the authentication cookies are set SSL-only, so they are not transmitted unencrypted.

However, if you had an active logged-in session going, you should log out, so that the cookie gets its correct SSL-only status!

Troubleshooting

If you encounter 500 Internal Server errors, try setting debug=1 in config.ini and looking into Apache logs and into data/mediasnake.log.

Development

If you want to hack on it, just run:

. env/bin/activate
./manage.py runserver

Then go read Django documentation from http://djangoproject.com/ if you haven’t already and hack away.

Contents