Serve up a folder of video files for your pleasure of viewing on a locally hosted server.

First, clone the repo onto your machine and install.

git clone https://github.com/kyle-west/video-captain.git
npm install

Next, you will need to set up your config.js in the root of video captain. For flexibility, you may adjust the location of the config file by setting the VC_CONFIG envar to the location of your file.

The file should be of the form:

module.exports = {
  mediaRoot: '/path/to/media/videos/',  // [REQUIRED] path to the root media folder you want to serve videos from
  port: process.env.PORT || 8080,       // [OPTIONAL] the port you want the server to host at (default 5555)
  settingsConfig: {                     // [OPTIONAL] make some custom preferences for how the system runs
    clientCanShutdownServer: true,      // allow setting on client side to shutdown server exits with (200) status
  }
}

You may also specify a couple callbacks that hook into the life cycle of this app.

• function ready (fullURL) receives the following string http://<ip-address>:<port> and runs when the server is ready to use
• function log (logEntry, timeRecorded) receives to strings and can be used to record interesting data for your purposes

const { open } = require('openurl')

module.exports = {
  ready: (fullURL) => {
    open(fullURL) // or whatever is you want
  },
  log: (logEntry, timeRecorded) => {
    console.log(`[${timeRecorded}]: ${logEntry}`) // or write to disk
  },
  ...
}

This program can best be ran by making a runnable script titled videocaptain which allows you to bootstrap onto the video captain life cycle.

In the following example, running videocaptain will automatically mount the drive if it is not mounted already, then boot up the server. The last bit of this checks makes videocaptain nighttime turn off the computer if the client shuts down the server.

#!/bin/bash

# mount the media drive if it is not already mounted 
if [ ! -d /media/videos ]; then # this is the same path as what is in `config.js`
  echo "Mounting Media Drive at /media"
  sudo mkdir -p /media
  sudo mount /dev/sda5 /media
fi

# go to the local project and run the server
cd ~/dev/video-captain
sudo PORT=80 node server.js # set the port to 80 because we want to host at `http://<computer-name>.local`
if [ $? -eq 200 ] && [ "$1" == "nighttime" ]; then
  echo "The program was shutdown with an exit code of [200], which means that it was shutdown intentionally by the client application"
  echo "Running > shutdown now"
  shutdown now
fi

Note that running with PORT=80 will host on your LAN or WLAN at http://<your-computer-name>.local.