Viewer Count Setup

Viewer counts are read from MediaMTX HLS sessions, deduplicated by Laravel-signed visitor identity, cached in Redis, and materialized into channels.viewer_count for list sorting and page display.

Laravel signs each live HLS URL with a short query string. Logged-in users get an opaque account-based viewer key, while guests get an encrypted nyone_visitor_id browser cookie and an opaque browser-based viewer key. MediaMTX still proves that playback is active; Laravel does not receive viewer heartbeats.

MediaMTX Control API

MediaMTX must expose its Control API on a private address that Laravel can reach:

api: yes
apiAddress: 127.0.0.1:9997

Keep this API private. Do not expose 127.0.0.1:9997 through a public firewall rule or reverse proxy.

Laravel Environment

Configure Laravel with the MediaMTX API URL and Redis cache store:

STREAMING_MEDIAMTX_API_URL=http://127.0.0.1:9997
STREAMING_VIEWER_COUNT_CACHE_STORE=redis
STREAMING_VIEWER_COUNT_TTL=10
STREAMING_VIEWER_SYNC_INTERVAL=2
STREAMING_VIEWER_IDENTITY_COOKIE=nyone_visitor_id
STREAMING_VIEWER_IDENTITY_COOKIE_LIFETIME_DAYS=365
STREAMING_VIEWER_IDENTITY_TTL=86400
STREAMING_VIEWER_STATS_POLL_INTERVAL=30000

REDIS_CLIENT=phpredis
REDIS_HOST=127.0.0.1
REDIS_PORT=6379

After changing these values, reload Laravel config:

php artisan config:clear

Verify Sync

With MediaMTX running and at least one active HLS viewer, run one sync pass:

php artisan streaming:sync-viewer-counts --once -v

The command should report the number of viewers and live channels it synced.

Multiple HLS sessions with the same valid signed viewer key count as one viewer. Direct HLS clients without a valid signed viewer key are still counted, but each MediaMTX session is counted separately because Laravel has no browser or user identity for those clients.

Run Continuously

Run the sync worker under Supervisor:

[program:nyone-viewer-counts]
process_name=%(program_name)s
command=php /var/www/nyone/artisan streaming:sync-viewer-counts --isolated
directory=/var/www/nyone
autostart=true
autorestart=true
stopasgroup=true
killasgroup=true
user=www-data
redirect_stderr=true
stdout_logfile=/var/www/nyone/storage/logs/viewer-counts.log
stopwaitsecs=10

Reload Supervisor:

sudo supervisorctl reread
sudo supervisorctl update
sudo supervisorctl status nyone-viewer-counts

Troubleshooting

If counts stay at 0, check:

MediaMTX has active HLS sessions.
STREAMING_MEDIAMTX_API_URL is reachable from Laravel.
Redis is running and Laravel can write to STREAMING_VIEWER_COUNT_CACHE_STORE.
storage/logs/viewer-counts.log has no connection errors.

2.7 KiB Raw Blame History