Prevents silent peer candidates from starving selected/SFU fallback while preserving one room-serial operation and one total deadline.
35 KiB
Minimal Deployment
Last verified against upstream documentation: 2026-08-23.
This page records exact release d3ff9e7 production facts and the current source
deployment contract. Product direction and pending migrations are owned by
project memory and the TODO ledger.
This section documents the repository's UDP-only deployment candidate: one Node.js process provides the built Web client, room API, and WebSocket signaling behind Caddy or nginx; application ICE advertises only STUN by default; LiveKit supplies bounded SFU fallback capacity. Normal media remains distributed through direct or peer edges whenever those paths work.
A deployment may additionally provide one dedicated single-node LiveKit process
as the current controller's automatic final media fallback. This capacity is
dormant unless the complete public URL, private API URL, key, secret, and capacity
tuple is configured. It does not replace the P2P path,
the peer-assisted experiment, or required STUN discovery. LiveKit remains
ICE/UDP only. Source no longer contains the rejected participant-wide Peer ICE TURN
candidate; stale PEER_ICE_TURN_* keys fail startup even when blank. The
selected-edge source tuple is enabled in production only for the controller's
single exceptional edge. Production ordinary peer ICE remains STUN-only and the
tracked coturn example remains stun-only; the shared host retains its older
authenticated-relay daemon configuration and firewall range. The application
does not pre-advertise TURN credentials to ordinary peers.
Production runs exact d3ff9e7b7b4a8fe58db700565971aaeda638d2e9, release
d3ff9e7, from /opt/screener/releases/d3ff9e7. The immutable runtime archive
SHA-256 is
a7c3b7b7cf593f3933a1c194a07370131fd76b3d4c30768b5206e84ccf93b63d.
Immediate rollback is /opt/screener/releases/352c457, with the verified
pre-cutover environment/LiveKit/unit backup at
/opt/screener/backups/d3ff9e7-precutover-20260823T150618Z. Local and public
health return 200; Screener, LiveKit, coturn, and nginx are active with
NRestarts=0.
The release deploys the single Browser screener-v8 wire, random four-digit
memory rooms with a 24-hour dormant lease, orthogonal grant/code admission,
20-Viewer room admission, the uniform endpoint media-copy cap 2, the
one-controller exact-candidate route runtime, and stale-v7 rejection before
room authority. The service unit has no writable room StateDirectory and the
old live SQLite path is absent. LiveKit is dedicated, has room.auto_create: false and
max_participants: 21, and is admitted to one global publication ingress plus
twenty subscription egress handles. Selected TURN has two logical allocations.
These bounds are fail-safe admissions, not throughput or quality claims.
The retained local 20-Viewer Browser smoke and open real-network boundaries are
owned by verification status.
Topology and prerequisites
Use two DNS names, for example share.example.com and stun.example.com. They
may resolve to the same public IP: the Web ingress owns TCP 443 while the
self-hosted STUN listener owns UDP 3478.
browser -- HTTPS/WSS --> Caddy or nginx :443 --> Node.js :8787
browser <------------ DTLS-SRTP P2P ------------> browser
browser -- STUN binding/UDP --> coturn :3478 (application advertises STUN only)
browser <---------- DTLS-SRTP/UDP ----------> LiveKit :7882
The minimum runtime is Node.js 24 LTS and coturn 4.17.2 or a newer patched release. Provision a valid TLS certificate for the Web name. Enable operating system time synchronization and keep the Node application port reachable only from its reverse proxy. A single Node process is intentional. Rooms, participants, and signaling remain in process memory; a restart intentionally invalidates every room and does not restore live WebRTC connections.
Build and validate the exact revision on a build host before starting it:
npm ci
npm run check
npm start
Do not run the repository full check, typecheck, or build on the current 960 MiB
no-swap production host. An inactive-release check before the 261e980c cutover
temporarily starved HTTP and SSH; exact 691863e remained current and all four
services stayed at NRestarts=0. The retained production path uses a locally
verified dist artifact plus one npm ci --omit=dev in a transient unit bounded
to 30% CPU, 160 MiB memory high, 256 MiB memory max, and 120 seconds. It then
runs only runtime imports, node:sqlite, and artifact/inode/permission gates.
Each immutable release must own an independent dependency tree. Never hard-link
node_modules or another file that deployment may chown, chmod, replace, or
remove: metadata changes would also mutate the rollback release. A copy or
copy-on-write reflink is acceptable only after an inode audit confirms that the
old and new regular-file sets have zero shared inodes. Do not recursively change
permissions until that check passes.
Transport archives must preserve UTF-8 entry names. Prefer the POSIX release archive path and verify the extracted manifest before switching. A Windows ZIP used for the 2026-08-20 route-rescue release altered two non-runtime Chinese documentation names on Linux. Runtime artifacts were unaffected and the immutable upload remains evidence, but do not reuse that packaging method.
In a strict-shell deployment, expected service states are data, not command
failures. Do not call systemctl is-active bare under set -e/ERR: an
intentionally stopped service returns a nonzero status and can trigger a false rollback. Read
ActiveState with systemctl show, compare the returned string explicitly, and
keep stop, symlink switch, start, health check, and rollback as separate steps.
Preflight every inspection dependency before taking a backup or changing a
service. If a host lacks the sqlite3 CLI, use the pinned Node runtime's
node:sqlite API or stop before the first write. After a start, poll health for
a short bounded window instead of treating one request during startup as a
failed release; retain the last failure while still enforcing the deadline.
Run npm start under a service supervisor that injects the environment, restarts
on failure, and applies bounded logs. For a simple untracked environment file,
the equivalent direct launch is
node --env-file=.env.production dist/server/server/index.js. Do not expose port
8787 to the Internet. The application default is 0.0.0.0 for LAN development
and container compatibility, while the bare-metal production baseline below
explicitly sets LISTEN_HOST=127.0.0.1 because only the same-host reverse proxy
should connect. A container can instead use 0.0.0.0 and enforce the intended
boundary with port publishing rules or a host firewall.
The optional same-host LiveKit layout needs no additional public hostname:
LIVEKIT_URL=wss://share.example.com and nginx proxies only current /rtc/v1*
requests to LiveKit. Retired /rtc and /rtc/validate endpoints return 404
without request-target logging. LiveKit's HTTP/WebSocket listener on TCP 7880 is
private to nginx and the Screener process uses
LIVEKIT_API_URL=http://127.0.0.1:7880 for RoomService; WebRTC media reaches
LiveKit directly on UDP 7882. No unrelated application may create rooms on this
instance, and its tracked configuration sets room.auto_create: false.
Install
screener-livekit-readiness.conf.example
as a screener.service.d drop-in on this layout. After= orders the services,
while the bounded ExecStartPre waits for TCP 7880 readiness; ActiveState alone
does not prove the LiveKit control listener is accepting connections.
Candidate boundary and rollback
The accepted target for share.bonfire.icu remains distributed and automatic:
direct/peer UDP first, with one Host publication available to authorized SFU
subscriptions when a logical edge cannot use peer transport. SFU-fed and
peer-fed endpoints use the same provisional-child transaction, and the exact
candidate child's first newly decoded frame commits that edge. Server-assisted
subscriptions and allocations use independent deployment admission rather than
an endpoint-cap or fixed-root rule.
The repository requires STUN and ordinary peer connections receive STUN-only
ICE. An existing logical edge prefers direct/peer UDP and may use exact selected
TURN when configured; only an unavailable logical ingress uses the Host
publication/SFU path. A Host-SFU ingress may itself use selected TURN. LiveKit
participants receive only revision-bound sfu-config URL/token messages and
negotiate within LiveKit's separate ICE domain. The selected-edge TURN
config/wire is deployed in the current 352c457 release with one UDP URL, a
120-second credential TTL, and two logical allocations. It was not exercised by
a real media session during this cutover.
PEER_ASSISTED_MEDIA=true is the process-wide topology/SFU switch. Every normal
room gets its own bounded controller state; ordinary peer connections remain
STUN-only and only the selected-edge source path may grant TURN to the
controller's then-current edge. Run candidate releases on an isolated
instance/hostname and keep
the old release unchanged for rollback. If the candidate fails, roll back the
release or instance; do not add a permanent dual-transport branch.
A memory-room release changes the application environment atomically: remove
ROOM_DATABASE_PATH and ROOM_TTL_SECONDS, add ROOM_LEASE_SECONDS, and do
not migrate or import SQLite rooms. Starting the candidate invalidates every
current production room, Host token, invitation, password verifier, and route;
open pages must refresh or explicitly create a replacement room. Keep the
recorded old release plus its SQLite environment/config backup unchanged for
rollback. Rolling back restores that exact old environment and database with the
old binary; it does not attempt to carry candidate rooms into SQLite.
A shared-public-IP instance can test candidate behavior while the old TURN service stays live, but it cannot prove the clean-port boundary or approve broad migration. The room-1 smoke uses this shape: nginx owns 443, LiveKit 1.13.5 owns UDP 7882, Peer ICE TURN is disabled, and LiveKit is fail-closed under a 192 MiB high/256 MiB hard cgroup limit with restart disabled. Prefer a separate VM/IP for the full gate and verify representative external networks and devices.
TURN REST authentication proves only HMAC and expiry to coturn. Coturn cannot verify a room, route, edge, or connection generation, so the application must bind issuance and parent/child rebuild to the current controller state, keep the attempt one-use and short-lived, and revalidate every asynchronous boundary. Never describe coturn itself as cryptographic selected-edge enforcement. HTTPS/WSS always remains TLS/TCP independently.
The 2026-08-20 exact-room canary used source a11a73dfa79d, inactive release
/opt/screener/releases/a11a73dfa79d-r4, artifact SHA-256
C954185869A3A15CCCE642AB72A4CF90770476C117D61182D7728280C30A036F, and
backup /opt/screener/backups/turn-a11-20260820T065933Z. The candidate
switch completed at 14:59:33 +08. Local authenticated coturn allocation and
application/deployment gates passed, but the real direct Host plus Pion Viewer
did not establish its peer connection. The forced-relay test was therefore not
run. Issuance was removed first, then coturn and its firewall rules returned to
the pre-canary authenticated-relay baseline: TCP/UDP 3478 and UDP 49152-49251.
Exact 7fea60ef6f2ad14a9ac1c23a89a523d91bbb97e4 was restored and advertises no
TURN credential. The final lock-free check at 15:12:40 +08 found active
services, zero allocations, and matching health, configuration, firewall, and
SQLite state.
No canary test process, browser profile, or transient firewall rule remained.
The retained release is inactive. This is a canary no-go, not TURN deployment
or media evidence. Two earlier attempts changed no durable state: one stopped
before backup/write because sqlite3 was absent, and one rolled back after a
single health request landed in the normal startup window. The preflight and
bounded-poll rules above are the retained fixes.
Production application environment
Keep the real values in the process secret store or an untracked, access-restricted
environment file. Node.js 24 can load such a file with --env-file; the tracked
.env.example is only a schema. Generate independent secrets with a password
manager or a cross-platform Node command such as:
node -e "console.log(require('node:crypto').randomBytes(32).toString('base64url'))"
Use this production baseline template:
NODE_ENV=production
LISTEN_HOST=127.0.0.1
PORT=8787
PUBLIC_BASE_URL=https://share.example.com
ALLOWED_ORIGINS=https://share.example.com
SITE_ACCESS_PASSWORD=<INDEPENDENT_8_TO_128_BYTE_ACCESS_KEY>
ROOM_LEASE_SECONDS=86400
MAX_ROOMS=1000
MAX_VIEWERS_PER_ROOM=20
ENDPOINT_MEDIA_COPY_CAPACITY=2
STUN_URLS=stun:stun.example.com:3478
To make automatic SFU fallback capacity available, add the complete tuple:
PEER_ASSISTED_MEDIA=true
LIVEKIT_URL=wss://share.example.com
LIVEKIT_API_URL=http://127.0.0.1:7880
LIVEKIT_API_KEY=<GENERATED_LIVEKIT_API_KEY>
LIVEKIT_API_SECRET=<INDEPENDENT_SECRET_OF_AT_LEAST_32_BYTES>
SFU_INGRESS_CAPACITY=<MEASURED_DEPLOYMENT_INGRESS_COPIES>
SFU_EGRESS_CAPACITY=<MEASURED_DEPLOYMENT_EGRESS_COPIES>
To enable exact selected TURN after bounded peer and SFU recovery, add its complete tuple:
SELECTED_EDGE_TURN_URLS=turn:turn.example.com:3478?transport=udp
SELECTED_EDGE_TURN_SHARED_SECRET=<INDEPENDENT_SECRET_OF_AT_LEAST_32_BYTES>
SELECTED_EDGE_TURN_CREDENTIAL_TTL_SECONDS=120
SELECTED_EDGE_TURN_ALLOCATION_CAPACITY=<MEASURED_DEPLOYMENT_ALLOCATIONS>
The rejected PEER_ICE_TURN_* participant-wide tuple is removed; supplying any
stale key, even blank, fails startup. Current source requires the complete
four-value SELECTED_EDGE_TURN_* tuple with one explicit TURN/UDP URI, an
independent secret, bounded TTL, and positive safe-integer logical-allocation
capacity. Each exact peer-selected edge and Host-SFU ingress consumes one unit
from the same process ledger before credential issuance; reserved, committed,
and draining authorizations stay charged until exact logical release. The
production release remains on its recorded configuration until the four-value
tuple is supplied atomically with current source. Only a controller-selected
edge may receive a short-lived grant. Roll back by
removing the application tuple before changing coturn or firewall state.
Credentials never enter URLs, logs, durable server storage, or browser
localStorage.
Application release does not prove deletion of the matching physical coturn
allocation. Keep the credential TTL short and configure coturn user-quota and
total-quota to bound allocations left by disconnect or process restart. A
restarted single process begins a fresh logical ledger while old physical
allocations expire under those coturn bounds; do not claim cross-restart
reconstruction or per-allocation readback.
Before a media canary, npm run gate:turn-udp-allocation provides the bounded
UDP allocation check. It proves only that an authenticated relay candidate can
be allocated over UDP; it does not prove a media route, recovery, quality, or
performance. Set CHROME_PATH in the process environment and supply the
complete selected-edge tuple either in that environment or as newline-delimited
KEY=value records on stdin. Values containing = are preserved. The script
uses an isolated Chrome profile and loopback-only in-memory credential response,
then emits only status, relay-candidate count, transport protocol, and coarse ICE
error-code buckets. Do not echo, log, or persist raw production environment
input; never add TURN URLs, usernames, credentials, candidate addresses, or raw
errors to the result.
PEER_ASSISTED_ROOM_IDS is retired. Supplying it, even blank, fails startup so
that a stale room-1 deployment cannot silently retain the old scope. With
PEER_ASSISTED_MEDIA=true, every normal room receives peer-assisted routing,
optional LiveKit fallback, and the same deployment resource/fanout/failure guards.
Every ordinary peer connection remains STUN-only; selected-edge TURN is still
issued only to a current controller-selected edge. There is no browser control,
percentage rollout, or second router.
ALLOWED_ORIGINS must list exact http or https origins, never *.
SITE_ACCESS_PASSWORD is required in production and must contain 8 through
128 visible ASCII bytes (0x21 through 0x7e). It must not be reused for
LiveKit, TLS, TURN, or another service. It authorizes room creation, Host role,
and code-only Viewer attempts; it does not replace a private room grant or
password. Local development and tests may omit it. Supplying a removed access
key, even blank, fails startup.
ROOM_LEASE_SECONDS defaults to 86,400 seconds and owns the dormant room
lifetime. An actively connected Host prevents expiry; explicit stop or Host
disconnect starts the lease, and only the exact Host token renews it before
expiry. Viewer activity never renews ownership. ROOM_DATABASE_PATH and
ROOM_TTL_SECONDS fail startup even when blank.
Production 352c457 accepts 1 through 20 and explicitly selects 20. This is an
admission limit, not evidence that every publisher, network, or quality profile
can sustain that many streams.
ENDPOINT_MEDIA_COPY_CAPACITY defaults to 2 and accepts only 1, 2, or 3. It is
the single server-authoritative steady outbound media-copy cap for Host and
Viewer endpoints; role, browser, UA, and visibility do not create another tier.
A peer child or the Host's single SFU publication consumes one copy, upstream
receive is free, a committed selected TURN transport for the same child does not
consume a second copy, and an uncommitted selected carry does. Transition work
may reach only min(C + 1, 3). A Host already sending three copies at C=3
must fail or wait before a fourth endpoint copy is issued; changing an existing
copy to selected TURN remains the same endpoint copy and separately requires
TURN allocation admission.
Supplying the removed MAX_PEER_RELAY_DOWNSTREAM_EDGES, even blank, fails
startup.
Production release 352c457 runs the deployed server and Browser assets
atomically on screener-v8; stale v7 Browser and executable-sender wires fail
before room authority. Native senders and helpers are outside this release.
Restore release 6b87732 with the exact precutover environment, unit, LiveKit
configuration, and SQLite backup when rolling back.
The four LIVEKIT_* values must either all be absent or all be present, and a
complete tuple requires PEER_ASSISTED_MEDIA=true plus explicit positive
safe-integer SFU_INGRESS_CAPACITY and SFU_EGRESS_CAPACITY values. The two
capacities have no defaults and must be selected from the instance's measured
publisher/subscriber/bitrate and accepted concurrency matrix. Supplying either
capacity without the complete fallback configuration fails startup rather than
silently enabling or ignoring a partial policy. An empty tuple with neither
capacity keeps the optional SDK and server path dormant. LIVEKIT_URL must be a
plain ws: or wss: origin with no /rtc suffix; production requires wss:.
LIVEKIT_API_URL must be a plain http: or https: origin with no path;
production permits plaintext only on loopback and otherwise requires https:.
LIVEKIT_API_SECRET must contain at least 32 bytes and must not reuse
SITE_ACCESS_PASSWORD. These credentials authorize short-lived LiveKit room
tokens and do not provide E2EE: the LiveKit operator can access ordinary SFU
media. The LiveKit instance is dedicated to this Screener process and has
room.auto_create: false. Screener first binds the configured application
listener exclusively; a competing process that cannot bind makes no LiveKit
call. While bound but not initialized it returns 503 and has no signaling
upgrade handler. It then rejects any foreign room name, deletes every stale
managed room, confirms the namespace empty, and begins serving. Each
exact-generation room is then created before its token is issued. Reserved,
committed, and draining generations remain charged until
DeleteRoom succeeds and a follow-up lookup proves absence. Run only one
application process until a shared atomic admission and lifecycle owner exists.
For the first candidate canary, use an isolated instance and one recorded room.
Restart the application, verify startup removes the now-stale managed LiveKit
room before serving traffic, and create a fresh application room after startup.
Hold the application port with another process and verify a competing
startup makes zero LiveKit calls. Verify that both the replacement room and a
second normal room contain
mediaMode: "peer-assisted", with independent route revisions and no shared
room state or capacity bypass. Exercise join, offer and answer, stale-token
reconnect after abort, Host signaling loss with and without a live Host
participant, stop, restart, and room deletion in both rooms. Confirm each drain
keeps capacity charged until the room is absent. Ordinary Web and
Native-shaped clients remain STUN-only. With the selected-edge tuple, only
the current controller-selected edge may receive a one-use grant; all other
sessions and connections remain STUN-only. Roll back by disabling application
issuance, stopping Screener, and proving every managed LiveKit room absent before
restoring the exact recorded application/LiveKit configuration and release; or
direct traffic to the unchanged old instance. Restore the coturn/firewall
baseline only after the application no longer issues its selected-edge grant.
Do not treat disabling
PEER_ASSISTED_MEDIA alone as TURN rollback: disable the selected-edge tuple
independently, and no removed old
TURN wire is restored. During migration, remove the retired room-ID variable in
the same coherent change; the process flag explicitly enables the all-room
controller.
Only POST /api/site-access accepts the site access secret in an
Authorization: Bearer header from an exact allowed Origin. Success returns a
12-hour stateless HMAC-SHA256 cookie with HttpOnly, SameSite=Strict,
Path=/, bounded Max-Age, and, under production HTTPS, Secure plus an
__Host- name. The cookie contains no account or server-side session ID. There
is no account database, JWT, session map, or logout endpoint.
Before an access-boundary release, set CHROME_PATH to a local Chrome or
Chromium executable and run npm run gate:access-privacy. The gate creates a
loopback in-memory room with an isolated browser profile, navigates the fragment
through CDP rather than a process argument, disposes that context, and emits only
fixed booleans and counts. It checks tracked request/nginx/application logs,
browser storage, fragment cleanup, absence of a persistent room file, and runs
the complete signaling suite containing the strong rotate/revoke teardown case.
It never connects to production or accepts a production credential; exact
production request/nginx/journal inspection remains separate.
nginx limits this exact endpoint per source at 5r/m with burst=5 nodelay and
returns 429 when exhausted. The limiter uses nginx shared memory; do not add the
secret, Authorization header, request body, or a new source-address field to
logs. POST /api/rooms accepts only the site-access cookie and strict JSON
with an explicit code-entry policy and optional room password; a Bearer header
is not an alternate creation
path. /signal still admits a cookie-free browser after Origin and capacity
checks and records the cookie state at upgrade. Host requires it with the room
Host token. A Viewer may omit it only when presenting a valid, unexpired grant
for that exact room; otherwise the server rejects before evaluating code entry.
Every room receives an independent invitation
/r/{code}#v={room-scoped-grant}; the fragment does not enter HTTP or WebSocket
request targets. The page validates it, writes it only to that room's
sessionStorage, and immediately replaces the visible URL with /r/{code}.
The Host may update or revoke that grant without changing code-entry policy.
Room allocation and lifetime use one deliberately small model:
- random unallocated codes come only from
1000through9999, never duplicate an active code, respectMAX_ROOMS <= 9000, and return on room release; - active Host sharing does not expire; stop, capture-track end, or Host
disconnect starts
ROOM_LEASE_SECONDS; - only the exact Host token resumes and renews before expiry, Viewer activity cannot, and expiry invalidates the code, credentials, verifier, participants, and routes; and
- process restart has the same fail-closed effect.
Code-only entry is independent of the invitation: after site access, open
accepts the four-digit code without a room password; password also requires
the room password; and disabled rejects code-only entry while a valid grant
still enters.
The server keeps only process-memory digests/verifiers for Host tokens, Viewer grants, and optional room passwords. There is no room database, schema, migration, writable room directory, or backup/restore step. The same browser may replay its Host display-name, code-entry, and optional-password creation profile when it explicitly creates a replacement room; this is local convenience, not server-side identity or cross-restart recovery.
Production startup requires one to eight syntactically valid stun: URLs
before the server listens. This validates shape only; it does not prove DNS,
firewall, NAT mappings, or external STUN reachability. The current application
rejects TURN_URLS, TURN_SHARED_SECRET, or TURN_CREDENTIAL_TTL_SECONDS when
any key is present, including with an empty value. Remove those obsolete keys
from the candidate environment; startup fails instead of pretending they enable
compatibility.
The rejected candidate names PEER_ICE_TURN_URLS,
PEER_ICE_TURN_SHARED_SECRET, and
PEER_ICE_TURN_CREDENTIAL_TTL_SECONDS must remain absent from production and
now fail startup even when blank. They are not aliases for the selected-edge
tuple; ordinary peer edges remain STUN-only while only the current controller
edge may use the configured selected-edge transport.
HTTPS and WSS ingress
Terminate public TLS at Caddy or nginx and proxy every application path to the
single Node process. /signal must preserve the WebSocket upgrade, Host, and
Origin, and its idle/read timeout must be longer than a normal sharing session.
Do not cache /api/* responses. Caddy's minimal same-host form is:
share.example.com {
reverse_proxy 127.0.0.1:8787
}
An equivalent nginx location is:
location / {
proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8787;
proxy_http_version 1.1;
proxy_set_header Host $host;
proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
proxy_read_timeout 1h;
}
The tracked
share.bonfire.icu.conf.example
follows this simple model and listens directly on public TCP 443. It does not
need an SNI transport router. Exact /rtc and pinned-v0 /rtc/validate requests
return 404 with access and request-line error logging disabled; only /rtc/v1*
is proxied. Current versioned requests carry a short-lived LiveKit JWT in the
query string, so no /rtc* target may fall through to the site's ordinary logs.
When Certbot manages the Web certificate, install the tracked
reload-nginx.sh as an executable under
/etc/letsencrypt/renewal-hooks/deploy/. Run certbot renew --dry-run after
the first certificate is installed. This hook reloads only the Web ingress.
Keep the proxy's access-log retention bounded and access controlled. Requests to
/r/{code} put the room code in the path, so access logs can contain room codes
as well as network metadata. They must not be treated as public artifacts. For
a private room, the grant remains in the fragment and is not part of that
request target. A code-only entry still requires prior site access unless its
policy is disabled; a valid grant remains the direct Viewer path.
For a process-level liveness probe, send GET /healthz. A running process
returns HTTP 200 with {"status":"ok"} and Cache-Control: no-store; other
methods return 405 with Allow: GET. The endpoint does not inspect room state,
STUN/SFU reachability, or any external dependency, so use it only to decide whether
the Node process can accept HTTP requests. It is not a deployment-readiness or
end-to-end media check.
Optional single-node LiveKit fallback
Use the tracked
livekit.yaml.example and
livekit.service.example as the
minimal single-node baseline. Install a reviewed, pinned LiveKit Server release
from its official release assets, generate an independent key pair with
livekit-server generate-keys, and place only the YAML key mapping in
/etc/livekit/keys.yaml. Keep that file owned by the livekit service account
with mode 0600; put the same values in Screener's untracked process secrets.
The example deliberately omits Redis and every recording, ingress, egress,
webhook, external-TURN, and embedded-TURN service. It explicitly sets
tcp_port: 0 and allow_tcp_fallback: false, and points stun_servers at the
deployment's self-hosted STUN listener so pinned LiveKit cannot inherit its
default public Google STUN servers. Do not add Redis for this one-node workload.
The service journal is the diagnostic log; keep its retention finite and access
restricted. Pinned LiveKit 1.13.5 includes raw PublisherOffer SDP in info-level
join records, so the tracked production baseline uses logging.level: warn and
pion_level: error. Raise either only in an isolated, short-lived canary and
remove its journal afterward. Never persist JWTs, SDP, ICE candidates, API
secrets, or full /rtc and /rtc/* request targets.
Configure both the host firewall and the provider firewall independently:
| Destination | Protocol | Exposure | Purpose |
|---|---|---|---|
127.0.0.1:7880 |
TCP | Private | nginx to LiveKit signaling/API |
public host :7882 |
UDP | Public | WebRTC ICE/UDP mux |
LiveKit may listen beyond loopback while it discovers and advertises public
media addresses, so the public-firewall denial of TCP 7880 is mandatory; nginx
must be its only ingress. UDP 7882 is a direct media listener and must not be
placed behind the HTTP reverse proxy. If the host is behind NAT, forward it
without port translation and verify the advertised candidate from an external
network. UDP-blocked networks are expected to fail clearly in this candidate;
do not set rtc.tcp_port above zero, enable TCP fallback, or add TURN to make a
canary pass silently.
Self-hosted STUN
This subsection describes the temporary STUN-only deployment template, not the
enabled selected-edge production environment or the current shared-host coturn
state. That host retains an older authenticated-relay configuration and TCP/UDP
3478 plus UDP 49152-49251 firewall range. In this template Screener advertises
no TURN credential and the canary audit found zero allocations; production
selected-edge issuance remains limited to the controller's one configured edge
and has one active Host-ingress forced-relay functional acceptance. Initial
Host ingress and peer-selected last mile remain open.
Copy deploy/coturn/turnserver.conf.example
to an untracked service-owned location and use the tracked
coturn.service.example. The config
uses coturn's documented stun-only mode, ignores every TURN allocation request,
and disables TCP and TLS client listeners. It has no auth secret, user database,
relay port range, certificate, quota, or TURN REST credential. Pinned coturn
4.17.2 deprecates no-dtls, so the tracked config does not use that obsolete
switch or claim a separate DTLS listener gate.
On a single-homed public host, automatic listener selection is sufficient. On a
multi-homed host, set listening-ip to the intended public interface. Open only
UDP 3478 and keep TCP 3478/5349 plus every old relay range closed. The same public
IP may serve HTTPS/WSS on TCP 443 and LiveKit media on UDP 7882.
The example writes informational logs to stdout. Apply finite supervisor
retention and restrict access because STUN sees client IP addresses. Do not
enable verbose or log-binding continuously. stun-only is a hard candidate
boundary, not a hidden unauthenticated TURN service.
Open only these public listeners:
| Destination | Protocol | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
share.example.com:443 |
TCP | HTTPS and WSS |
stun.example.com:3478 |
UDP | STUN binding only |
host public address :7882 |
UDP | LiveKit WebRTC ICE/UDP mux |
Verification
Run these checks from real external networks before calling the deployment usable:
- Open the official Trickle ICE sample
and test the configured STUN URL. It must produce an
srflxcandidate over UDP and norelaycandidate. Confirm TCP 3478/5349 and the old relay range are closed externally. - Create a normal Screener room on two different networks. Confirm media flows and the selected-pair stats report a non-relay path when direct ICE succeeds.
- On a normal room, exhaust a peer route and verify exactly one Host
publication serves only the admitted SFU subscriptions over LiveKit UDP 7882.
Peer descendants stay on ordinary direct UDP and every non-server endpoint
obeys the configured
ENDPOINT_MEDIA_COPY_CAPACITY. - Force one controller-eligible edge past SFU/UDP and verify only that edge gets the short-lived TURN server plus relay policy and selects TURN/UDP. Ordinary peer PCs must stay STUN-only. Then block all UDP and verify bounded recovery ends clearly without ICE/TCP, TURN/TCP, or a long pseudo-connected path.
- Exercise root departure, reconnect, SFU unavailable, route prepare rollback, stop, and source/profile changes. Unaffected subtrees must not migrate.
- Repeat at 1, 3, 5, and 20 viewers across representative consumer networks. Record selected protocol, RTT, bitrate, frame rate, packet loss, publisher upload/encode load, LiveKit ingress/egress, and final decoded quality. A real public-network 1:20 session remains unverified; the passed local synthetic 1:20 smoke does not replace this heterogeneous-network quality gate.
References: coturn 4.17.2 release, pinned turnserver documentation, the pinned example configuration, RFC6265bis, LiveKit firewall guidance, and the pinned LiveKit configuration sample.