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Owncast on Windows
Note: Owncast currently does not natively support the Windows Operating System, however it is possible to run Owncast on Windows using the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2).
This document is a user-contributed document and the Owncast project does not actively maintain Windows support. Hopefully this can be helpful in pointing people in the right direction.
This document list out the steps in detail to install and run Owncast in Windows using Windows Subsystem for Linux, specifically WSL2.
Below are steps both for local development, contributing to the project and running it in production.
Required: Installing WSL2 in Windows
There are lots of tutorials available online (videos and docs both) on how to install WSL2.
Here are the official documents from Microsoft -> Install Linux on Windows with WSL
Some points to remember ->
- Preferable method to install WSL2 is by using the
wsl --install. If you are facing issues with this method you can look at - Manual installation steps for older versions of WSL - Make sure you have enabled the Virtual Machine feature. (ignore if used wsl --install method)
- Make sure you have WSL2
- Installed your Linux distribution of choice and make sure you installed the latest available version (Preferably Ubuntu)
Setting up WSL2 and the distribution of your choice
After basic setup, you can look into setting WSL2 for development. Here is the link for a detailed document by Microsoft - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/setup/environment
Installing Owncast under WSL2
Once you're running WSL2 in Windows you can install Owncast the same way you would on any Linux distribution by following the Quickstart guide.
Contributing to Owncast by performing local development
If you want to use your Windows machine to contribute to Owncast, you'll need to do so under WSL2 and make sure the following prerequisites are installed.
Make sure all the prerequisites are installed in WSL2
Here is the list for all the prerequisites required ->
- C compiler, such as GCC compiler or a Musl-compatible compiler
- npm (Node Package Manager) is installed as
sudo apt install npm. - Node.js is installed (LTS Version)
sudo apt install nodejs. - ffmpeg
- Install the Go toolchain (1.21 or above).
Read more
Once your local development environment is setup, you can read more about how to contribute to Owncast by reading the development document.
Some possible issues you can face while setting up WSL2
You have an older version of Nodejs installed in the WSL2
To solve this issue you can look at nvm. Here is one tutorial - Node-Version-Manager.
The broadcasting Software failed to connect to the server
This issue arises when you try to use rtmp://localhost:1935/live for example in OBS.
To solve this issue you need to find the correct IP address for the WSL2 you are running and use that instead of localhost.
You can use the below commands to find that ->
Note: you can use either of these, whichever works for you.
- In WSL2 Terminal -
ip addr show eth0 | grep -oP '(?<=inet\s)\d+(\.\d+){3}' - In Windows Terminal -
wsl -- ip -o -4 -json addr list eth0In this result look for "local": X.X.X.X
After finding the IP address in your broadcasting software make the server point to
rtmp://<your version of IP address>:1935/live
Example in OBS-Studio ->
