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Installing Flussonic

Learn how to install, activate, and start Flussonic Media Server.

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Prerequisites

Before you install Flussonic Media Server, make sure the following conditions are met:

  • Your system satisfies the system requirements.
  • HTTP port 80 is open and no other applications in your OS listen to this port. By default, Flussonic Media Server uses HTTP port 80.

Installing Flussonic Media Server

You can install Flussonic Media Server on Ubuntu, CentOS/RedHat and other RPM-based distributions.

On Ubuntu

Supported architectures: amd64, arm64.

Supported OS versions: Ubuntu LTS 22.04, 20.04.

Install Flussonic Media Server using the apt tool:

curl -sSf https://flussonic.com/public/install.sh | sh

After installation finishes, activate Flussonic Media Server

On RPM-based CentOS/RedHat and others

Danger

We strongly recommend that you avoid using RPM-based distributions like CentOS, RedHat, and Suse. We do not provide technical support on issues concerning RPM packages and distributions to users with less than 10 licenses.

Install Flussonic Media Server from Yum repository using the following command in the terminal:

cat > /etc/yum.repos.d/Flussonic.repo <<EOF
[flussonic]
name=Flussonic
baseurl=http://apt.flussonic.com/rpm
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0
EOF
yum -y install flussonic-erlang flussonic flussonic-transcoder
service flussonic start

After installation finishes, activate Flussonic Media Server

Activating Flussonic Media Server

To activate Flussonic Media Server:

1) Start the server by running the following command in the terminal:

service flussonic start

2) Open the Flussonic admin UI by entering the http://FLUSSONIC-IP:80/ URL in the browser. FLUSSONIC-IP is the IP address of your Flussonic server.

3) Enter the license key you received and set the administrator's username and password that you are going to use. You can find your license key in the client area on my.flussonic.com/.

Warning

Both login and password must NOT include any of the following characters: @, ;, #, [, \, /, =, $

Flussonic start page

Read more about Flussonic license at Using the license key.

4) Check if your Flussonic installation is correct by running the following command:

service flussonic status

Flussonic Media Server is ready to work.

Note

We suggest you do some fine-tuning for best performance with a large number of clients.

Warning

You need to disable swap completely as its presence is not compatible with video streaming. If a server doesn't have enough RAM, it can't be extended with swap.

About configuration file

When you start the admin UI for the first time and activate Flussonic Media Server, a configuration file is created automatically. It contains the default settings, such as the path to the Pulse database and session log.

If you already have an experience with Flussonic, you can also prepare this file manually: specify the login and password in this file and copy it to the server immediately after installation.

How to change the administrator's password?

You can change the administrator's password by editing the config file or using the admin UI.

Editing the configuration file

1) Open the /etc/flussonic/flussonic.conf config file and change the password in the edit_auth directive.

2) To apply the changes, reload the server configuration by running the following command:

service flussonic reload

Using the admin UI

1) Go to the Config page in the navigation menu.
2) Head to the Settings tab and find the Access section. Enter your new password in the Admin UI password field and repeat the password in the field below. Apply the changes by clicking Save .

Changing admin password

Starting and stopping Flussonic

To manage Flussonic in the terminal, use the following commands:

  • To start the service:
service flussonic start
  • To stop the service:
service flussonic stop
  • To restart the service:
service flussonic restart
  • To reconfigure the service with active client connections:
service flussonic reload

Running Flussonic in a Docker container

Flussonic Media Server is available for installation to Docker containers.

Installation in Docker will allow you to run Flussonic on different operating systems if they support Docker, not just Ubuntu. It also allows you to take full advantage of Docker's benefits: isolation, security, container orchestration, and more. We recommend Docker for testing and experimentation, for small scape services, and when you use only TCP/HTTP protocols.

To run Flussonic in a Docker container, use:

docker run -p 80:80 -v /etc/flussonic:/etc/flussonic flussonic/flussonic

Note

Make sure that port 80 is not used by other applications.

To run Flussonic in a Docker container with hardware transcoding using NVIDIA NVENC, use the following command:

docker run --rm -p 80:80 -v /etc/flussonic:/etc/flussonic --gpus all -e NVIDIA_DRIVER_CAPABILITIES='all' flussonic/flussonic:latest

We do not recommend using the following Flussonic functions when it runs in a container because additional configuration is required:

  • UDP ingest (IGMP)
  • Hardware transcoding (QSV)
  • WebRTC protocol

How to change time zone on your server

If you need to change the time zone on the server, this can be done using standard operating system tools. Changing the time zone on the server does not affect the operation of Flussonic Media Server, since all operations internally are carried out in the UTC time zone, including logging. We recommend that you always synchronize your server's time via NTP.