LiveKit: Real-time video, audio and data for developers

LiveKit is an open source project that provides scalable, multi-user conferencing based on WebRTC. It's designed to provide everything you need to build real-time video audio data capabilities in your applications.

LiveKit's server is written in Go, using the awesome Pion WebRTC implementation.

Features

• Scalable, distributed WebRTC SFU (Selective Forwarding Unit)
• Modern, full-featured client SDKs
• Built for production, supports JWT authentication
• Robust networking and connectivity, UDP/TCP/TURN
• Easy to deploy: single binary, Docker or Kubernetes
• Advanced features including:
  • speaker detection
  • simulcast
  • end-to-end optimizations
  • selective subscription
  • moderation APIs
  • end-to-end encryption
  • SVC codecs (VP9, AV1)
  • webhooks
  • distributed and multi-region

Documentation & Guides

https://docs.livekit.io

Live Demos

• LiveKit Meet (source)
• Spatial Audio (source)
• Livestreaming from OBS Studio (source)
• AI voice assistant using ChatGPT (source)

Ecosystem

• Agents: build real-time multimodal AI applications with programmable backend participants
• Egress: record or multi-stream rooms and export individual tracks
• Ingress: ingest streams from external sources like RTMP, WHIP, HLS, or OBS Studio

SDKs & Tools

Client SDKs

Client SDKs enable your frontend to include interactive, multi-user experiences.

Server SDKs

Server SDKs enable your backend to generate access tokens, call server APIs, and receive webhooks. In addition, the Go SDK includes client capabilities, enabling you to build automations that behave like end-users.

Tools

• CLI - command line interface & load tester
• Docker image
• Helm charts

Install

[!TIP] We recommend installing LiveKit CLI along with the server. It lets you access server APIs, create tokens, and generate test traffic.

The following will install LiveKit's media server:

MacOS

brew install livekit

Linux

curl -sSL https://get.livekit.io | bash

Windows

Download the latest release here

Getting Started

Starting LiveKit

Start LiveKit in development mode by running livekit-server --dev. It'll use a placeholder API key/secret pair.

API Key: devkey
API Secret: secret

To customize your setup for production, refer to our deployment docs

Creating access token

A user connecting to a LiveKit room requires an access token. Access tokens (JWT) encode the user's identity and the room permissions they've been granted. You can generate a token with our CLI:

lk token create \
    --api-key devkey --api-secret secret \
    --join --room my-first-room --identity user1 \
    --valid-for 24h

Test with example app

Head over to our example app and enter a generated token to connect to your LiveKit server. This app is built with our React SDK.

Once connected, your video and audio are now being published to your new LiveKit instance!

Simulating a test publisher

lk room join \
    --url ws://localhost:7880 \
    --api-key devkey --api-secret secret \
    --identity bot-user1 \
    --publish-demo \
    my-first-room

This command publishes a looped demo video to a room. Due to how the video clip was encoded (keyframes every 3s), there's a slight delay before the browser has sufficient data to begin rendering frames. This is an artifact of the simulation.

Deployment

Use LiveKit Cloud

LiveKit Cloud is the fastest and most reliable way to run LiveKit. Every project gets free monthly bandwidth and transcoding credits.

Sign up for LiveKit Cloud.

Self-host

Read our deployment docs for more information.

Building from source

Pre-requisites:

• Go 1.23+ is installed
• GOPATH/bin is in your PATH

Then run

git clone https://github.com/livekit/livekit
cd livekit
./bootstrap.sh
mage

Contributing

We welcome your contributions toward improving LiveKit! Please join us on Slack to discuss your ideas and/or PRs.

License

LiveKit server is licensed under Apache License v2.0.

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