Livepeer CLI Setup

In the following guide, we will cover all the necessary steps to transcode a video into multiple bitrates using the Livepeer protocol, and then add it to Media Network to serve this processed content to end-users through the CDN.

Install the Livepeer Client

Install a binary release

Find the latest release for your platform on the releases page. Linux, Darwin (macOS) and Windows are supported.

# <RELEASE_VERSION> is the release version i.e. 0.5.14
# <YOUR_PLATFORM> is your platform i.e. linux, darwin, windows
wget https://github.com/livepeer/go-livepeer/releases/download/<RELEASE_VERSION>/livepeer-<YOUR PLATFORM>-amd64.tar.gz
tar -zxvf livepeer-<YOUR_PLATFORM>-amd64.tar.gz
mv livepeer-<YOUR_PLATFORM>-amd64/* /usr/local/bin/

Install with Docker

Docker images are pushed to DockerHub.

# <RELEASE_VERSION> is the release version i.e. 0.5.14
docker pull livepeer/go-livepeer:<RELEASE_VERSION>

To pull the latest pre-release version:

docker pull livepeer/go-livepeer:master

Install a binary pre-release

Binaries are produced from every GitHub commit and download links are available in the #builds channel of the Livepeer Discord server.

These binaries are produced from go-livepeer's CI process, shown in this diagram:

Build from source

System dependencies

Building livepeer requires some system dependencies.

Linux (Ubuntu: 16.04 or 18.04):

apt-get update && apt-get -y install build-essential pkg-config autoconf gnutls-dev git curl
# To enable transcoding on Nvidia GPUs
apt-get -y install clang-8 clang-tools-8

Darwin (macOS):

brew update && brew install pkg-config autoconf gnutls

Windows:

The steps in this file can be used as a reference.

Go

Building livepeer requires Go. Follow the official Go installation instructions.

Build and install

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/livepeer/go-livepeer.git
   cd go-livepeer

2. Install ffmpeg dependencies:

   ./install_ffmpeg.sh

3. Set build environment variables.

   Set the PKG_CONFIG_PATH variable so that pkg-config can find the ffmpeg dependency files installed in step 2:

   # install_ffmpeg.sh stores ffmpeg dependency files in this directory by default
   export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=~/compiled/lib/pkgconfig

   Set the BUILD_TAGS variable to enable mainnet support:

   export BUILD_TAGS=mainnet
   # To build with support for only development networks and the Rinkeby test network
   # export BUILD_TAGS=rinkeby
   # To build with support for only development networks
   # export BUILD_TAGS=dev

4. Build and install livepeer:

   make
   cp livepeer* /usr/local/bin

Build with Docker

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/livepeer/go-livepeer.git
   cd go-livepeer

2. Export tags:

   echo $(git describe --tags) > .git.describe

3. Build image:

   docker build -t livepeerbinary:debian -f docker/Dockerfile.debian .