Virtual Events Starter Kit

This virtual event starter kit was used to run Next.js Conf 2020, which had almost 40,000 live attendees. It includes the following features:

• Multiple stages - with the ability to add multiple sessions on each stage
• Each stage can be configured as -
  • An embedded YouTube stream OR
  • A live interactive audio-video experience powered by 100ms
• Sponsor expo, including individual virtual booths
• Career Fair, allowing attendees to network and find job opportunities
• Ticket registration and generation
• Speaker pages and bios
• Schedule

This platform is built upon three principles:

• Delegation: Running a conference is difficult – you have to delegate tasks to third-parties to ensure success. Certain elements of an online conference experience are tough to get right, and we'd rather lean on established, industry leading solutions.
• Flexibility: While delegating certain elements of the conference experience is helpful, it's also important to own the platform. That's why this template provides a flexible open-source codebase that can be modified for your event.
• Reducing Risk: It's inevitable something will go wrong during your event. This platform reduces risk by leaning on a dynamic site that outputs as static files using Incremental Static Generation. These static files are cached, ensuring your site is never down. Then, it uses API Routes to sprinkle dynamic content on top, which are hosted by a provider with 99.99% uptime.

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Built With

• Framework: Next.js
  • CSS Modules
  • TypeScript
• CMS: Multiple Options
• Video (Pre-recorded): YouTube
• Live interactive video: 100ms
• Deployment: Vercel
• Authentication: GitHub OAuth
• Database: Redis

What’s New?

The virtual events starter kit now has added support for organising truly LIVE virtual events. You can quickly setup a live stage and invite speakers to interact with viewers. Live audio-video opens up a ton of possibilities with respect to what you can do with this template. You can use it for:

1. Live Webinars
2. Community Calls
3. Hackathons
4. Panel Discussions
5. Multi-stage live conferences with a backstage (coming soon)

Clone and Deploy

Click the button below to clone and deploy this template on Vercel.

You’ll be asked to install the 100ms with DatoCMS integration. It lets you sign up or log in to 100ms and DatoCMS, and connects your DatoCMS and 100ms account to vercel. In a single integration, you will be able to deploy a fully working template that contains all the elements of the virtual events starter kit.

Running Locally

NOTE: Before this setup make sure to deploy the project using 100ms + DatoCMS integration to speed up the setup process.

After the project is deployed on Vercel, you can find DATOCMS_READ_ONLY_API_TOKEN and NEXT_PUBLIC_HMS_TOKEN_ENDPOINT already setup in the environment-variables section in project settings. The integration also sets up the rooms, templates & roles associated with it.

First, to set local environment variables you can either use Vercel CLI vercel env pull or just manually copy paste them.

cp .env.local.example .env.local

Then install the package and run the development server:

yarn install
yarn dev

Open http://localhost:3000 to see the landing page.

Stages

There are four different stages included in the seed data. Feel free to add or remove these based on your schedule. Each stage can be easily configured to be a Live Video/Audio experience or an embedded YouTube stream. (You can do all of these configurations via DatoCMS console)

Joining a stage

Visit /stage/a after entering your email you should see a "Enter your name" input form.

NOTE: by default, you will join as a Viewer

Click on Join and you should see "No Speakers Present". This is because only you have joined the Stage aka the "Room" as a viewer. A viewer does not have the permission to publish their audio and video. You can read more about roles in the sections below.

Joining with different Roles

For this we pass a query param in url for eg: /stage/a?role=<ROLE_NAME>

• Moderator: /stage/a?role=backstage

• Speaker: /stage/a?role=stage

• Viewer: /stage/a

So if you visit /stage/a?role=stage now you should see a Preview screen opening up. After joining you should be able to see yourselves. Open a new tab or invite others to host your next meetup, community calls, etc.

Customize

Live Video

To learn more on how to customise the live video aspect of this template, refer to this document.

CMS

Environment variables determine which CMS to use. See lib/cms-api.ts for details and .env.local.example for all environment variables. The demo (demo.vercel.events) uses DatoCMS, but we also have support for:

• Agility
• Contentful
• Prismic (Instructions)
• Sanity
• Storyblok
  • Click the following link to create the space for this starter kit in Storyblok: Create Event Space

Constants

lib/constants.ts contains a list of variables you should customize.

Note - In case you're looking to add live audio-video to the events template, we'd recommend you to move ahead with DatoCMS for a seamless integration experience. We've created a dato + 100ms integration that will help you to integrate both 100ms and DatoCMS to your vercel account in a few clicks.

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Authentication and Database

Some features won’t work until you set up authentication and database. The demo (demo.vercel.events) uses GitHub OAuth for authentication and Redis for database. You can use different providers as you see fit.

Authentication

You need to have GitHub OAuth set up to be able to customize the ticket after signing up on the registration form.

First, create a GitHub OAuth application to use for authentication.

• Set Authorization Callback URL as <your domain>/api/github-oauth
• After creating the OAuth app, create a client secret.

Running Locally:

• Set the Authorization Callback URL as http://localhost:3000/api/github-oauth on GitHub.
• On .env.local, set NEXT_PUBLIC_GITHUB_OAUTH_CLIENT_ID as the Client ID of the OAuth app.
• Set GITHUB_OAUTH_CLIENT_SECRET as the Client secret of the OAuth app.
• Finally, make sure the NEXT_PUBLIC_SITE_ORIGIN environment variable is set as http://localhost:3000. This is required to get the OAuth popup to work locally.
• Restart the app (yarn dev) after editing .env.local.

Once it’s set up, sign up using the registration form on the home page (not on a stage page) and then click "Generate with GitHub".

On Vercel:

• Set the Authorization Callback URL as <your deployment’s URL>/api/github-oauth on GitHub.
• Set NEXT_PUBLIC_GITHUB_OAUTH_CLIENT_ID and GITHUB_OAUTH_CLIENT_SECRET on Vercel Project Environment Variables Settings for the production environment.
• Edit SITE_URL in lib/constants.ts to match your deployment’s URL (no trailing slash).
• Push the code to redeploy the Project on Vercel.

Database

You need a database to save user data and enable the following features:

• Generating a unique ticket number for each email when signing up on the registration form. If DB is not set up, it’ll always be 1234.
• Generating a unique ticket image or ticket URL after signing in with GitHub. If DB is not set up, each ticket image or URL will show generic data.

The demo (demo.vercel.events) uses Redis, but you can customize it to use any database you like.

Running Redis Locally

1. Install Redis locally and run it.
2. Specify the following in .env.local:

REDIS_PORT=6379 # Default Redis port number REDIS_URL=localhost REDIS_PASSWORD= REDIS_SSL_ENABLED= REDIS_EMAIL_TO_ID_SECRET=foo # Come up with your own secret string

REDIS_EMAIL_TO_ID_SECRET will be used to create a hash of the email address, which will be used for the Redis key for each user data (i.e. id:). See lib/redis.ts for details.

If your Redis server has SSL (TLS) encryption enabled then set REDIS_SSL_ENABLED=true

1. Restart the app (yarn dev) after editing .env.local.
2. In a separate terminal window, start the Next.js dev server (yarn dev) and sign up using the registration form.
3. In a separate terminal window, run Redis CLI, list keys (keys *) and inspect a id:<hash> key (hgetall id:<hash>). You should see the newly registered user.

Using Redis On Vercel

Provision your own Redis instance and set REDIS_PORT, REDIS_URL, REDIS_PASSWORD, REDIS_SSL_ENABLED and REDIS_EMAIL_TO_ID_SECRET (come up with your own secret string) on Vercel Project Environment Variables Settings for the production environment.

If you do not want to maintain a Redis server, you can use Upstash which provides Serverless Redis with a free tier.