Remote storage (S3) #

In PeerTube version 3.4.0 native support was added for storage in S3 compatible object stores.

Native object storage #

If your object storage provider supports the AWS S3 API, you can configure your instance to move files there after transcoding. The bucket you configure should be public and have CORS rules to allow traffic from anywhere.

Live videos are still stored on the disk. If replay is enabled, they will be moved in the object storage after transcoding.

PeerTube Settings #

Endpoint and buckets #

Here are two examples on how you can configure your instance:

# Store all videos in one bucket on Backblaze b2
object_storage:
  enabled: true

  # Example Backblaze b2 endpoint
  endpoint: 's3.us-west-001.backblazeb2.com'

  videos:
    bucket_name: 'peertube-videos'
    prefix: 'videos/'

  # Use the same bucket as for webtorrent videos but with a different prefix
  streaming_playlists:
    bucket_name: 'peertube-videos'
    prefix: 'streaming-playlists/'

# Use two different buckets for webtorrent and HLS videos on AWS S3
object_storage:
  enabled: true

  # Example AWS endpoint in the us-east-1 region
  endpoint: 's3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com'
  # Needs to be set to the bucket region when using AWS S3
  region: 'us-east-1'

  videos:
    bucket_name: 'webtorrent-videos'
    prefix: ''

  streaming_playlists:
    bucket_name: 'hls-videos'
    prefix: ''

Credentials #

You will also need to supply credentials to the S3 client. The official AWS S3 library is used in PeerTube, which supports multiple credential loading methods.

If you set the credentials in the configuration file, this will override credentials from the environment or a ~/.aws/credentials file. When loading from the environment, the usual AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID variables are used.

Cache server #

To reduce object storage cost, we strongly recommend to setup a cache server (CDN/external proxy). Set your mirror/CDN URL in object_storage.{streaming_playlists,videos}.base_url and PeerTube will replace the object storage host by this base URL on the fly (so you can easily change the base_url configuration).

Max upload part #

If you have trouble with uploads to object storing failing, you can try lowering the part size. object_storage.max_upload_part is set to 2GB by default, you can try experimenting with this value to optimize uploading. Multiple uploads can happen in parallel, but for one video the parts are uploaded sequentially.

CORS settings #

Because the browser will load the objects from object storage from a different URL than the local PeerTube instance, cross-origin resource sharing rules apply.

You can solve this either by loading the objects through some kind of caching CDN that you give access and setting object_storage.{streaming_playlists,videos}.base_url to that caching server, or by allowing access from all origins.

Allowing access from all origins on AWS S3 can be done in the permissions tab of your bucket settings. You can set the policy to this for example:

[
    {
        "AllowedHeaders": [
            "*"
        ],
        "AllowedMethods": [
            "GET"
        ],
        "AllowedOrigins": [
            "*"
        ],
        "ExposeHeaders": []
    }
]

Backblaze B2 has a similar setting, you can set it via the b2 command line tool:

b2 update-bucket --corsRules '[
        {
            "allowedHeaders": [
                "range",
                "user-agent"
            ],
            "allowedOperations": [
                "b2_download_file_by_id",
                "b2_download_file_by_name"
            ],
            "allowedOrigins": [
                "*"
            ],
            "corsRuleName": "downloadFromAnyOrigin",
            "exposeHeaders": null,
            "maxAgeSeconds": 3600
        },
        {
            "allowedHeaders": [
                "range",
                "user-agent"
            ],
            "allowedOperations": [
                "s3_head",
                "s3_get"
            ],
            "allowedOrigins": [
                "*"
            ],
            "corsRuleName": "s3DownloadFromAnyOrigin",
            "exposeHeaders": null,
            "maxAgeSeconds": 3600
        }
    ]' bucketname allPublic

Migrate videos from filesystem to object storage #

Use create-move-video-storage-job script.

Migrate to another object storage provider #

PeerTube stores object URLs in the database, so even if you change the object storage configuration it will serve previously uploaded videos using the old object storage endpoint while serving new uploads using the new object storage endpoint.

File URLs migration in PeerTube is not provided yet.