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Beep

A video-conferencing component you can drop into a larger product. A Python backend, a Svelte frontend, and a narrow documented contract between them — running on unmodified upstream Galene as the SFU.

Running on stock Galene

The whole stack works against an unpatched upstream build: both end-to-end suites pass, real bidirectional media flows, and presence is persisted to Postgres. Proof and reproduction recipe in notes/v3/evidence/full-stack/.

What Beep is, and isn't

Beep does not fork Galene. make galene-bin builds a pinned upstream checkout into vendor/galene/, and the entire SFU-side configuration is a single group file (see SFU). Everything the integration needs turned out to be reachable without patching the SFU.

That wasn't the original plan. An earlier iteration forked Galene and added four "primitives" to it; all four turned out to be unnecessary. notes/v3/upstream-gap-check.md records how that was established and notes/v3/retrospective.md covers the experiment.

The parts

Part Language Role Swappable?
SFU Go (upstream) Media forwarding and /ws signalling It's a pinned dependency — see SFU
backend Python (Litestar) Reference implementation of /api/v1/ Yes — see alt-backend
front Svelte 5 SPA Meeting UI Yes — /api/v1/ is the contract

The frontend is the product surface. The backend is a reference implementation, not the only one: a host platform writes its own /api/v1/ and keeps the frontend and SFU unchanged.

alt-backend/ makes that concrete — roughly 220 lines of aiohttp with no database, passing the same Playwright specs as the 9,000-line Litestar backend. It is the contract's conformance test: if a change breaks it, the change is wrong.

How the backend talks to the SFU

Two mechanisms, neither of which requires a modified Galene:

  • Rooms are implicit. The parent group carries auto-subgroups, so meetings/<slug> exists as soon as somebody joins. Nothing is provisioned and nothing is deleted.
  • Join tokens are signed by the backend against the key in that group's authKeys. Username and permissions travel in the token, so no user directory is needed anywhere.
  • Presence and moderation ride an operator connection. The backend joins each active room as a client holding the op permission. That connection sees Galene's user add/change/delete stream and can issue kick, lock and record.