simstosh/amphitheatre repository overview

A private online room for you and your friends: text chat, voice, camera, screen share, and — if you want — everyone watching the same live stream together. No sign-up, no ads, and you own the server it runs on.

⁠Contents

• What is Amphitheatre?⁠
• What you get⁠
• How do I run it?⁠
• Documentation⁠
• How to Contribute⁠
• License⁠

⁠What is Amphitheatre?

Think of it as your own small, private version of a Discord voice channel with a shared screen — except it also has a "cinema mode": if you want, one person can broadcast from OBS and everyone else watches that exact same live video together, in sync.

Rooms are temporary (nobody keeps a permanent account) and there is nothing to install for your friends — they just open a link in the browser, type a name, and join.

A few things it is not: it is not Netflix, and it does not include or endorse streaming someone else's paid content — the "broadcast" feature is a generic tool, the same way OBS or Zoom screen share are generic tools. It also does not record anything: once a call ends, it is gone, by design.

⁠What you get

• No accounts. Pick a display name and you're in. Your role (owner, admin, member...) is remembered if you come back to the same room.
• Text chat, voice, camera, and screen share, built on LiveKit⁠ (the same open-source technology behind many video products).
• An optional "watch together" stage — one person streams from OBS, Twitch, YouTube, Kick, or any URL, and it plays for everyone in the room, off by default.
• Moderation that just works: kick, mute, ban, and a password lock that temporarily blocks someone after 3 wrong guesses.
• Works well on phones, not just desktop — the mobile layout is designed on its own, not a squeezed-down desktop view.
• Available in English, Portuguese, and Spanish.

⁠How do I run it?

There are two very different audiences here, so pick the one that matches you:

⁠"I just want to use it — I'm not a developer"

You don't need to download the source code or write any code. Grab the small deploy/ folder from this repository (or clone the whole thing, that also works), point a domain at your server, and start it with Docker:

git clone https://github.com/simstm/amphitheatre.git
cd amphitheatre/deploy
cp env.example .env    # fill in your domain and a couple of secrets
docker compose --profile caddy up -d

That downloads ready-made images from Docker Hub⁠ — nothing is compiled on your machine. Full step-by-step guide, including how to use Traefik instead of the built-in reverse proxy, and which firewall ports you need to open: Self-hosting guide⁠.

Just kicking the tires on your own computer? A single command gets the app itself running (though voice/video needs the LiveKit piece too — see the guide):

docker run -p 3001:3001 -e SESSION_SECRET=change-me simstosh/amphitheatre:latest

⁠"I want to change the code / contribute"

Now you do want the full repository, plus Bun and pnpm on your machine. See Getting started⁠ for the developer setup:

pnpm install
cp .env.example .env
cp apps/api/.env.example apps/api/.env
make up      # starts the voice/video engine locally
pnpm dev     # starts the app itself

⁠Documentation

⁠How to Contribute

Thank you for contributing. See CONTRIBUTING.md⁠ for setup, tests, and the pull-request flow.

Pull requests need the Individual Contributor License Agreement⁠. The CLA Assistant bot comments on the PR with the signature sentence.

⁠License

Amphitheatre is licensed under AGPL-3.0-only⁠, copyright SIMSDEV⁠.

The public tree stays AGPL so anyone who hosts a modified version as a network service must offer the corresponding source. SIMSDEV may dual-license contributions (including a future paid hosted offering) through the ICLA⁠. Details: License and CLA⁠.