Watchy

Watchy is a small private synchronized watch room. It keeps one shared room in memory and focuses on direct video URL playback, chat, playlists, local media browsing, and video reactions.

This fork intentionally removes the original multi-room portal, accounts, subscriptions, virtual browser, screen sharing, file sharing, YouTube/WebTorrent integrations, Discord, Firebase, Redis, Postgres, and VM management code.

Features

• One shared in-memory room
• Password-gated access with a long-lived auth cookie
• Direct HTTP/HTTPS media URL playback
• Browser-native video plus HLS streams through hls.js
• Synchronized play, pause, seek, playback rate, loop, and playlist state
• Chat with markdown, emoji picker, replies, edits, message reactions, and colored names
• Splash reactions over the video
• Local media browser for a configured server-side directory
• Optional theater/fullscreen layout and resizable chat column

Room state is intentionally ephemeral and resets when the Node process restarts.

Requirements

• Node.js with TypeScript execution support for erasable TypeScript syntax
• npm
• A reverse proxy or direct Node binding for deployment

Install

npm install

Build

npm run build

This runs the Vite production build, client typecheck, and server typecheck.

Run

npm start

By default the server listens on 127.0.0.1:3090 and serves the app at /watchy.

Configuration

Configuration is provided through environment variables:

Variable	Default	Description
PORT	3090	Node server port
HOST	127.0.0.1	Node bind host
BASE_PATH	/watchy	App mount path
WATCHY_PASSWORD	change-me	Password for the room
WATCHY_COOKIE_SECRET	derived from password	HMAC secret for auth cookies
WATCHY_MEDIA_ROOT	./media	Directory scanned by /api/media
WATCHY_MEDIA_BASE_URL	/watchy/media	URL prefix for files under WATCHY_MEDIA_ROOT

WATCHY_MEDIA_ROOT should point only at files you intend to expose. The API only returns supported video files and safe child paths. By default, media is served from the app under /watchy/media; set WATCHY_MEDIA_BASE_URL when files are exposed by another web server or CDN.

Supported local media extensions:

• .mp4
• .webm
• .m4v
• .mov
• .m3u8

Development

npm run dev

For frontend-only iteration you can also run:

npm run ui

Scripts

• npm start - run the Node server
• npm run dev - run the Node server in watch mode
• npm run ui - run Vite
• npm run build - build and typecheck everything
• npm run typecheck - typecheck the client
• npm run typecheckServer - typecheck the server

Notes

• The app shell can be served publicly while API and Socket.IO access remain gated by the auth cookie.
• Socket.IO uses the configured BASE_PATH for its websocket path.
• The deployment proxy must support websockets.