Supported tags and respective `Dockerfile` links

latest (Dockerfile)_

Note: Note: There are tags for each build date. If you need to "pin" the Docker image version you use, you can select one of those tags. E.g. tiangolo/nginx-rtmp:latest-2020-08-16.

nginx-rtmp

Docker image with Nginx using the nginx-rtmp-module module for live multimedia (video) streaming.

Description

This Docker image can be used to create an RTMP server for multimedia / video streaming using Nginx and nginx-rtmp-module, built from the current latest sources (Nginx 1.15.0 and nginx-rtmp-module 1.2.1).

This was inspired by other similar previous images from dvdgiessen, jasonrivers, aevumdecessus and by an OBS Studio post.

The main purpose (and test case) to build it was to allow streaming from OBS Studio to different clients at the same time.

GitHub repo:

Docker Hub image:

Details

How to use

For the simplest case, just run a container with this image:

docker run -d -p 1935:1935 --name nginx-rtmp tiangolo/nginx-rtmp

How to test with OBS Studio and VLC

Run a container with the command above

Open OBS Studio
Click the "Settings" button
Go to the "Stream" section
In "Stream Type" select "Custom Streaming Server"
In the "URL" enter the rtmp://<ipofhost>/live replacing <ipofhost> with the IP of the host in which the container is running. For example: rtmp://192.168.0.30/live
In the "Stream key" use a "key" that will be used later in the client URL to display that specific stream. For example: test
Click the "OK" button
In the section "Sources" click the "Add" button (+) and select a source (for example "Screen Capture") and configure it as you need
Click the "Start Streaming" button

Open a VLC player (it also works in Raspberry Pi using omxplayer)
Click in the "Media" menu
Click in "Open Network Stream"
Enter the URL from above as rtmp://<ipofhost>/live/<key> replacing <ipofhost> with the IP of the host in which the container is running and <key> with the key you created in OBS Studio. For example: rtmp://192.168.0.30/live/test
Click "Play"
Now VLC should start playing whatever you are transmitting from OBS Studio

Manual RTMP playback test

You can also verify retransmission by watching the stream yourself. First build and run the image:

docker build -t nginx-rtmp-test .
docker run --rm --name nginx-rtmp-test -p 1935:1935 nginx-rtmp-test

In a second terminal, publish a generated test stream:

./scripts/publish-test-stream.sh

This publisher is intentionally long-running and will not exit on its own. Leave it running while you watch the stream, then stop it with Ctrl+C.

In a third terminal, watch the retransmitted stream:

ffplay rtmp://127.0.0.1:1935/live/test

You should see the moving FFmpeg test pattern and hear a generated tone. VLC can also open rtmp://127.0.0.1:1935/live/test as a network stream.

Debugging

If something is not working you can check the logs of the container with:

docker logs nginx-rtmp

Extending

If you need to modify the configurations you can create a file nginx.conf and replace the one in this image using a Dockerfile that is based on the image, for example:

FROM tiangolo/nginx-rtmp

COPY nginx.conf /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

The current nginx.conf contains:

worker_processes auto;
rtmpautopush on;
events {}
rtmp {
    server {
        listen 1935;
        listen [::]:1935 ipv6only=on;
application live {             live on;             record off;         }     } }

You can start from it and modify it as you need. Here's the documentation related to nginx-rtmp-module.

RTMPS (RTMP with TLS)

This image includes Nginx stream SSL support, so you can terminate TLS in Nginx and proxy the decrypted RTMP connection to the RTMP application. With this setup, clients publish and play through rtmps://<domain>/live/<key> on port 1935, while the internal RTMP server listens on 127.0.0.1:1936.

Create an nginx.conf like this, replacing the certificate paths with paths available inside your container:

worker_processes auto;
rtmpautopush on;
events {}
stream {     upstream backend {         server 127.0.0.1:1936;     }
server {         listen 1935 ssl;         proxy_pass backend;         ssl_certificate /etc/nginx/certs/fullchain.pem;         sslcertificatekey /etc/nginx/certs/privkey.pem;     } }
rtmp {     server {         listen 1936;         chunk_size 4096;
application live {             live on;             record off;         }     } }

Then build a small image with your custom configuration:

FROM tiangolo/nginx-rtmp

COPY nginx.conf /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

Run it with your TLS certificates mounted into the container:

docker run -d \
  -p 1935:1935 \
  -v /path/to/certs:/etc/nginx/certs:ro \
  --name nginx-rtmps \
  your-nginx-rtmps-image

For example, if your certificate files are mounted as /etc/nginx/certs/fullchain.pem and /etc/nginx/certs/privkey.pem, configure an RTMPS client to use:

rtmps://<domain>/live/<key>

Technical details

This image is built from the same base official images that most of the other official images, as Python, Node, Postgres, Nginx itself, etc. Specifically, buildpack-deps which is in turn based on debian. So, if you have any other image locally you probably have the base image layers already downloaded.

It is built from the official sources of Nginx and nginx-rtmp-module without adding anything else. (Surprisingly, most of the available images that include nginx-rtmp-module are made from different sources, old versions or add several other components).

It has a simple default configuration that should allow you to send one or more streams to it and have several clients receiving multiple copies of those streams simultaneously. (It includes rtmpautopush and an automatic number of worker processes).