Getting Started

This is a step-by-step guide to setting up a DistribuStream server.

Step One: Install Ruby

Installing Ruby will vary depending on your platform:

Windows: Grab the Windows Ruby installer
OS X: Leopard ships with both Ruby and RubyGems. If you’re using an earlier version of OS X, then follow this guide
Linux/BSD/etc: Ruby is often bundled with Unix-like operating systems. If not, install Ruby through your package manager (e.g. apt-get install ruby, yum install ruby)

Step Two: Install RubyGems

RubyGems is the standard Ruby package manager. It’s similar to apt-get, emerge, and other OS package managers.

Download RubyGems

(extract, then run “ruby setup.rb”)

If you have any problems getting RubyGems installed, check out the RubyGems User Guide

Step Three: Install DistribuStream

Once you have RubyGems installed, you can use it to download and install DistribuStream and all of its dependencies with a single command:

gem install distribustream —include-dependencies

This will download and install DistribuStream and should hopefully add the server and client programs, dstream and dsclient, to your path.

Step Four: Configure DistribuStream

To begin, download the example DistribuStream configuration file and edit it to your choosing. Be sure to set the host address to bind to and optionally the vhost you wish to identify as.

Next, start the DistribuStream server:

dstream -f—conf myconfig.yml

If everything went well, you should see something similar to the following:

dstream starting. Run 'dstream --help' for more info.
status at http://192.168.0.51:6087/status
accepting connections on 192.168.0.51:6086
file service running at 192.168.0.51:6087

You can think of the DistribuStream server like a regular web or FTP server. It looks through the specified directory and makes the files underneath it available to the peer-to-peer network.

You can see what’s going on through the web interface, which runs one port above the port you configured the server to listen on. If the server is listening on the default port of 6086, you can reach the web interface at:

http://myserver.url:6087/status

Step Five: Test Your Server

To test your server, use the DistribuStream client:

dsclient pdtp://myserver.url/file.ext

This will download file.ext from your DistribuStream server.

The client also supports non-seekable output such as pipes. To play streaming media as it downloads, you can:

dsclient -o pdtp://myserver.url/file.ext | mediaplayer –

Just replace “mediaplayer” with your favorite media player program, e.g. vlc, mplayer