KoalaParty

Privacy-first shared YouTube rooms. Synchronized playback, a collaborative queue and live chat without advertising, analytics, fingerprinting, or a required account for unlisted rooms.

Features

• Paste a YouTube link anywhere in a room (or drop it, or share it from the YouTube app on Android) and it is queued instantly; an idle room starts it right away. Several links, playlists (optional), ?t= start times, play next and play now are supported.
• Ephemeral live chat, emoji reactions and join notices that also show over the video in fullscreen; nothing is stored.
• Vote to skip, per-person presence (who is buffering or still needs to tap for sound), undo for removals, room names and self-chosen display names without an account.
• Optional server-side YouTube search and playlist import with KOALAPARTY_YOUTUBE_API_KEY.
• Countdown starts and “wait for everyone” so all viewers begin on the same frame, room modes (party, cinema, host only), short links with QR codes, scheduled parties, saved queues, a reaction heatmap and a shareable party recap.
• English and German interface.
• Server-authoritative play, pause, seek, queue, reorder, skip, and reconnect behavior.
• Collaborative queue voting, shuffle, loop, duplicate protection, history, and ephemeral emoji reactions.
• Room-synchronized playback speed and optional SponsorBlock skipping of sponsor/intro/outro segments for everyone at once.
• Persistent anonymous browser identities; optional accounts and friend-only rooms.
• Cross-device room library, private invitations, account/session self-service, and ownership transfer.
• Owner/admin/member roles, per-member capabilities, kick, ban, visibility, and activity history.
• Optional public discovery with controlled provider metadata; disabled by default for early-beta deployments.
• Responsive SvelteKit UI with accessible loading, empty, error, connection, light, dark, and system-theme states.
• Browser-local recent-room shortcuts on the start page, including for anonymous users.
• Floating mini-player, playback drift diagnostics, and live room previews for returning viewers.
• Go, WebSockets, SQLite WAL, embedded migrations, Docker, health/readiness probes, and Caddy-ready TLS deployment.

Quick start

Requirements: Go 1.26.8, Node.js 24 LTS, npm 12, and Docker.

git clone https://github.com/Shik3i/KoalaParty.git
cd KoalaParty
cd frontend && npm ci && cd ..
make verify
docker compose up --build

Open http://127.0.0.1:8080. The anonymous identity belongs to the current browser storage; create an account before clearing it if room ownership must be recoverable.

Deploy a release image

Release images support linux/amd64 and linux/arm64:

cp .env.example .env
docker pull ghcr.io/shik3i/koalaparty:0.13.0
docker compose -f deploy/docker-compose.ghcr.yml up -d

The official deployment is preconfigured for https://party.koalastuff.net and the shared external caddy_net used by the other Koala services. Pin an exact image version and verify KOALAPARTY_TRUSTED_PROXIES against that Docker network. Public room discovery remains disabled until KOALAPARTY_PUBLIC_ROOMS=true is explicitly selected. See deployment.

Verification

make verify
cd frontend && npm run test:e2e
cd ../backend && go test -race -count=1 ./...
cd .. && node --test scripts/*.test.mjs
docker compose up -d --build

CI additionally runs dependency scanning, a frontend audit, Docker build/health smoke tests, and the browser suite. See testing.

Documentation

• Architecture and project structure
• Authentication, permissions, and protocol
• Database, privacy, and known limitations
• Deployment, testing, and releasing
• Changelog, security policy, and contributing guide

Releases

Pushing a stable tag matching vX.Y.Z runs the full verification suite (including the tag/changelog check in scripts/verify-release.mjs), then builds and pushes a multi-architecture GHCR image (linux/amd64, linux/arm64) with SBOM, provenance, and a signed build attestation.

License

KoalaParty is free and open-source software licensed under the MIT License.

Third-party data

Optional segment-skipping uses data from SponsorBlock, licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. KoalaParty is a non-commercial project without KoalaParty analytics, ads, fingerprinting, or fees and attributes SponsorBlock in-app wherever segments are used. The feature can be disabled entirely with KOALAPARTY_SPONSORBLOCK=false or per room.