Television Simulator now has a Docker image that runs a simple HTTP server and exposes a volume for your configuration file and content.

Advantages

• You can get a web server setup that’s sandboxed and preconfigured to run TVS
• Deployment to any Docker hosting provider is easy, and if you have any other services that integrate with TVS like radio or video servers you can create a docker-compose file with your entire environment.
• Deployment to a LAN or to the public Internet will function the same way.
• When you update TVS your content isn’t affected. Also you can rollback to an older version if necessary.

Disadvantages

• You must install Docker on the host machine first or use a hosting provider, making the setup not as straightforward for a single computer as the standalone version.

Getting the container

Get it from Docker Hub.

Here’s an example Docker Compose file on Linux:

services:
  tvs-server:
    image: 'zshall/television-simulator:latest'
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - '80:3000'
    volumes:
      - /var/tvs/config.tvs.yml:/home/static/config.tvs.yml
      - /var/tvs/content:/home/static/content

Port 3000 is the default port but it’s a good practice to change it to something unique.

You need to specify the volume for config.tvs.yml since the server Docker image doesn’t contain a default configuration.

Using HTTPS

The TVS Server image doesn’t come with HTTPS because it’s often better to use a reverse proxy, especially in a Docker setup. Nginx Proxy Manager is my top recommendation here. It can be deployed through Docker as well and if you set up a wildcard subdomain redirection in your DNS records you can route a lot of different HTTPS subdomains on your LAN or on the Internet. Set up a proxy host pointing to your machine on port 3000 (or your custom port) and use Let’s Encrypt to set up an SSL certificate.

• You can use the normal method if your server is publicly accessible on port 80 / 443 from the public internet, but if it’s on a LAN for internal use only you’ll need to use a DNS challenge instead.
• You need a DNS provider that’s up to the task of dynamically doing the DNS challenge and a real domain. I recommend CloudFlare for both since it’s easy to configure with LetsEncrypt.

<aside> 📌 HTTPS is infectious, for better or for worse. If you enable HTTPS on your instance of TVS you’ll need to make sure that all the resources you connect to also use it. Your media streams especially. HLS streams are “auto-upgraded” to HTTPS and if they can’t be they won’t work.

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