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Stream powers Chat Messaging, Video & Audio, and Activity Feeds for billions of global end-users across thousands of different apps.

Stream’s global edge network ensures a faster and more reliable experience for your video calls and livestreams. Excellent developer experience and docs enable you to build in-app video calling in days. Scale to millions of users and thousands of call participants.

For the average Stream integration, the development work focuses on code that executes in the client. However, some tasks must be executed from the server for safety (for example, token generation).

Stream provides server-side SDKs to help execute these tasks.

You can reference our development roadmap to know which languages and features are supported.

Installation

All official SDKs are available on package managers, full source code is available on the GetStream Github organization.

pip install getstream

The source code of our SDKs is available on Github. If you find issues with any SDK you can also create an issue on Github directly:

Creating client

To create a server-side client, you'll need your API key and secret. Both of them can be found in your Stream Dashboard.

You can optionally pass a timeout for the API requests, the default timeout is 3000ms.

from getstream import Stream

client = Stream(api_key="your_api_key", api_secret="your_api_secret", timeout=3.0)

Configuring Fetch API for Node SDK

The Node SDK uses the built-in Fetch API to create HTTP requests. The Fetch API uses a default connection pool that doesn't have a cap on the maximum connections. If you want to limit this, or do any other configuration, you can do it by installing the undici library.

# For Node 20.18.1+
npm install undici@7

# For Node 18.17+
npm install undici@6

# For Node 18+
npm install undici@5

You can provide your own custom Agent to the StreamClient:

import { Agent } from "undici";

const client = new StreamClient(apiKey, appSecret, {
  agent: new Agent({ connections: 100 }),
});

Creating users and user tokens

To create a user you need to provide an ID, and their role. Optionally you can also specify their name and an image, these fields are recognized and rendered by the default SDK components. It's also possible to add any other custom data.

Tokens need to be generated server-side. Typically, you integrate this into the part of your codebase where you log in or register users. The tokens provide a way to authenticate a user or give access to a specific set of video/audio calls.

const userId = 'john';
const newUser: UserRequest = {
  id: userId,
  role: 'user',
  custom: {
    color: 'red',
  },
  name: 'John',
  image: 'link/to/profile/image',
};
await client.upsertUsers([newUser]);

// validity is optional (by default the token is valid for an hour)
const vailidity = 60 * 60;

client.generateUserToken({ user_id: userId, validity_in_seconds: validity });

Creating a call

You can create a call by providing the call type and an ID:

  • The call type controls which features are enabled and sets up permissions. Call type settings and permissions can be set from API, or using the Stream Dashboard.
  • Calls can be used once or multiple times depending on your app. Unless you want to re-use the same call multiple times, the recommended way to pick a call ID is to use a uuid v4 so that each call gets a unique random ID.

You can specify call members who can receive push notification about the call.

It's also possible to store any custom data with the call object.

const callType = 'default';
const callId = 'my-first-call';
const call = client.video.call(callType, callId);

call.create({ data: { created_by_id: 'john' } });

// optionally provide additional data
call.create({
  data: {
    created_by_id: 'john',
    // Call members need to be existing users
    members: [{ user_id: 'john', role: 'admin' }, { user_id: 'jack' }],
    custom: {
      color: 'blue',
    },
  },
});

// Upsert behavior
call.getOrCreate({data: /* */});

Call types

Call types provide sensible default settings for different use-cases. We provide the following types out of the box:

  • Default (default) for 1:1 or group calls that use both video and audio
  • Livestreaming (livestream) to build ultra low latency livestreaming for your app on our global edge network. Broadcast from your phone or RTMP and scale to millions of participants.
  • Audio room (audio_room) to build audio experiences for your app. You can build basic calling or feature rich experience like Twitter spaces. Audio quality, reliability and scalability is far ahead of competing solutions.
  • Development (development) This call type comes with almost all permission settings disabled so that it is simpler to get your initial implementation up and running. You should only use this call type early-on during development.

Each of our SDKs have tutorials specific for each call type. If you want to know the default settings for each of the call types check out the Built-in call types page.

It's possible to tweak the built-in call types or create new ones.

Call members

You can provide a list of call members, this can be done when you create a call or later on when the call already exists. Please note that call members need to be existing users.

There are two reasons to use call members:

  • Call membership allows you to have more flexibility when it comes to permissions. The permission system allows you to grant different permissions to users and members, this way one user can be a member on one call or a member on another. Membership also allows you to grant additional roles to users in a call. It's important to note that this doesn't restrict access, but rather expands capabilities. You can more information about the roles and permissions here.
  • Call members will receive push notifications.
// Call members need to be existing users
call.updateCallMembers({
  // You can add new members
  // You can also update the role of existing members
  update_members: [{ user_id: "sara" }, { user_id: "emily", role: "admin" }],
});

You can also remove call members:

call.updateCallMembers({
  remove_members: ["sara"],
});

Updating a call

Default call settings are inherited from the call type. These settings can be overridden if necessary.

call.update({
  settings_override: {
    audio: { mic_default_on: true, default_device: "speaker" },
  },
});

// or to update custom data
call.update({ custom: { color: "red" } });
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