PeerTube is a self-hosted and (optionally) federated video sharing platform that saves bandwith on videos the more people watch. PeerTube instances can follow each other to share videos and grow the federated network, but you can always keep your instance to yourself if you choose to.
Note on Bandwidth
Video sharing is the most bandwidth intensive thing on the internet! If you plan on just having a small personal site with a few viewers and friends, that won't be a big concern, but most VPS providers like Vultr have caps on how much bandwidth can be used within a month without being throttled. This level is far beyond what most sites need, but it might be an issue with a video site!
So if you plan on having a big video-sharing PeerTube site, it's a good idea to host it with a provider that offers infinite bandwidth. I strongly recommend getting a separate VPS with Frantech/BuyVM. They have unmetered bandwidth, extremely cheap block storage for hosting many, many videos and they even have a good record of being censorship resistant.
Prerequisites
Most of PeerTube's dependencies can be installed with this command:
apt install -y curl sudo unzip vim ffmpeg postgresql postgresql-contrib g++ make redis-server git python-dev cron wget
It's also important to start all associated daemons:
systemctl start postgresql redis
PeerTube also requires NodeJS 14 and yarn which cannot be installed from the Debian repositories. This means they have to be installed from separate, external repos:
curl -fsSL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_14.x | bash -
apt install -y nodejs
npm install --global yarn
In addition to these dependencies, it's recommended to create a dedicated PeerTube user to install and manage PeerTube.
useradd -m -d /var/www/peertube -s /bin/bash -p peertube peertube
Database
PeerTube requires a PostgreSQL database to function. To create it, first make a new Postgres user named PeerTube:
su postgres
createuser -P peertube
createdb -O peertube -E UTF8 -T template0 peertube_prod
psql -c "CREATE EXTENSION pg_trgm;" peertube_prod
psql -c "CREATE EXTENSION unaccent;" peertube_prod
exit
Be sure to make note of your Postgres user password, as it will be needed later when setting up PeerTube.
Installation
This handy one-liner can be used to determine the latest PeerTube version:
VERSION=$(curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/chocobozzz/peertube/releases/latest | grep tag_name | cut -d '"' -f 4) && echo "Latest Peertube version is $VERSION"
Next, a basic directory structure needs to be setup in the PeerTube user's home directory (/var/www/peertube).
To ensure permissions remain the same while managing files as PeerTube, sudo
can be used to perform actions:
sudo -u peertube mkdir config storage versions
sudo -u peertube chmod 750 config
Finally, a PeerTube release can be downloaded from the GitHub page using the VERSION
variable from before:
cd /var/www/peertube/versions
sudo -u peertube wget -q "https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/releases/download/${VERSION}/peertube-${VERSION}.zip"
sudo -u peertube unzip -q peertube-${VERSION}.zip && sudo -u peertube rm peertube-${VERSION}.zip
The downloaded release can then be symbolically linked to /var/www/peertube/peertube-latest
and yarn is used to install PeerTube:
sudo -u peertube ln -s versions/peertube-${VERSION} ./peertube-latest
cd ./peertube-latest && sudo -H -u peertube yarn install --production --pure-lockfile
Configuration
PeerTube's default config file can be copied over to /var/www/peertube/config.production.yaml
so it can actually be used:
cd /var/www/peertube
sudo -u peertube cp peertube-latest/production.yaml config/production.yaml
Now the production.yaml
file must be edited in the following ways:
First, add the hostname:
webserver:
https: true
hostname: 'example.org'
port: 443
Then, the database:
database:
hostname: 'localhost'
port: 5432
ssl: false
suffix: '_prod'
username: 'peertube'
password: 'your_password'
pool:
max: 5
An email to generate the admin user:
admin:
# Used to generate the root user at first startup
# And to receive emails from the contact form
email: 'chad@example.org'
And optionally, email server information:
smtp:
# smtp or sendmail
transport: smtp
# Path to sendmail command. Required if you use sendmail transport
sendmail: null
hostname: mail.example.org
port: 465 # If you use StartTLS: 587
username: your_email_username
password: your_email_password
tls: true # If you use StartTLS: false
disable_starttls: false
ca_file: null # Used for self signed certificates
from_address: 'admin@example.org'
NGINX
PeerTube includes an NGINX configuration that can be copied over to /etc/nginx/sites-available:
cp /var/www/peertube/peertube-latest/support/nginx/peertube /etc/nginx/sites-available/peertube
Because the PeerTube config is so long, it's recommended to use sed
to modify the contents of the file,
replacing ${WEBSERVER_HOST}
with your hostname,
and $(PEERTUBE_HOST)
with your localhost and port, which by default should be 127.0.0.1:9000
:
sed -i 's/${WEBSERVER_HOST}/example.org/g' /etc/nginx/sites-available/peertube
sed -i 's/${PEERTUBE_HOST}/127.0.0.1:9000/g' /etc/nginx/sites-available/peertube
Once you're happy with the NGINX config file, link it to sites-enabled
to activate it:
ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/peertube /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/peertube
Encryption with Certbot
It's highly recommended to generate certificates for use with your PeerTube site, and this can be easily done with Let's Encrypt's certbot
command:
systemctl stop nginx
certbot certonly --standalone -d example.org
sudo systemctl restart nginx
The certificates are generated standalone since the PeerTube NGINX config file already includes configuration for certbot.
Running PeerTube
A config file for a systemd daemon is included in PeerTube and can be setup like so:
cp /var/www/peertube/peertube-latest/support/systemd/peertube.service /etc/systemd/system/
systemctl daemon-reload
Now, finally, run the PeerTube daemon to start PeerTube:
systemctl start peertube
Using PeerTube
To set a password for your admin user, run:
cd /var/www/peertube/peertube-latest && NODE_CONFIG_DIR=/var/www/peertube/config NODE_ENV=production npm run reset-password -- -u root
Login to your PeerTube instance using the admin email specified in your production.yaml
file and the admin password you just set.

Once logged in, it's recommended to create a separate user without admin privileges for uploading videos to PeerTube. This can be done easily from the users tab in the administration section:
Enjoy your PeerTube instance!
Updating PeerTube
PeerTube is constantly adding new features, so it's a good idea to check for new updates and add them if you wish. Just in the past year, they have added livestreaming and more.
Updating is fairly easy now since an upgrade.sh
script has been added. Just run:
cd /var/www/peertube/peertube-latest/scripts && sudo -H -u peertube ./upgrade.sh
Although check the changelog to see if there are additional manual requirements for particular updates.