Glimpse

Random video chat with strangers, plus private rooms you can invite people into — with real chatrooms, custom roles, and public profiles on top. Live at glimpse-vc.vercel.app.

Features

• Random matching — hit the queue, get paired with whoever else is waiting. Match notifications arrive over SSE, no polling.
• Private rooms — create a room, share the link or code, talk to people you actually know.
• Calls through an SFU — video/audio runs through LiveKit Cloud. This replaced the old PeerJS peer-to-peer setup, which had the nasty property of exposing participants' IP addresses to each other. Media is relayed now; nobody sees anybody's IP.
• Chatrooms with Discord-style roles — custom roles with granular permissions: manage_room, manage_roles, manage_members, manage_messages, invite, send_media.
• Media in chat — images and files upload to Vercel Blob.
• Live everything — chat messages and queue updates stream over Server-Sent Events.
• Public profiles — every user gets /u/[handle] with a QR code and JSON-LD markup, plus sitemap/robots for search engines.
• OAuth-only sign-in — Discord or GitHub via Auth.js v5, JWT sessions. No passwords to leak.
• Local-first dev — no Turso credentials? The database falls back to a local SQLite file and everything still works.

Architecture

flowchart LR
    B[Browser]

    subgraph vercel [Vercel]
        N[Next.js App Router]
        D[Drizzle ORM]
    end

    B -->|HTTPS + SSE| N
    N -->|Auth.js v5| O[Discord / GitHub OAuth]
    N --> D
    D --> T[(Turso libSQL)]
    N -->|chat media| BL[(Vercel Blob)]
    N -->|mints access tokens| L

    B <-->|WebRTC, media relayed| L[LiveKit Cloud SFU]

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Calls never go browser-to-browser. The server mints a short-lived LiveKit token, and all audio/video is relayed through the SFU — participants never learn each other's IP addresses.

The random-match flow:

sequenceDiagram
    participant A as Browser
    participant S as Next.js
    participant LK as LiveKit Cloud

    A->>S: join queue
    S-->>A: SSE stream open
    Note over S: another user joins, match made
    S-->>A: matched! (via SSE)
    A->>S: request LiveKit token
    S-->>A: signed token + room name
    A->>LK: connect (wss)
    LK-->>A: media relay begins

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Tech stack

Layer	What
Framework	Next.js 16.2, App Router, Turbopack
Auth	Auth.js v5 — Discord + GitHub OAuth, JWT sessions
Database	Turso (libSQL) via Drizzle ORM; local SQLite file fallback in dev
Calls	LiveKit Cloud SFU (livekit-client + livekit-server-sdk)
Chat media	Vercel Blob
Realtime	Server-Sent Events (chat, queue)
Styling	Tailwind CSS v4, Radix primitives, Framer Motion
Client state	Zustand (settings)

Local setup

git clone https://github.com/aryansrao/glimpse.git
cd glimpse
npm install
cp .env.example .env.local
# fill in the variables below
npm run dev

You can run with an almost-empty .env.local: leave the Turso variables unset and the app uses a local glimpse-local.db file. You will need at least one OAuth app (Discord or GitHub) and a free LiveKit Cloud project to sign in and make calls.

Useful scripts: npm run db:push (push schema straight to the configured DB), npm run db:generate (emit migration files), npm run db:studio (browse rows in Drizzle Studio).

Environment variables

Variable	Purpose
TURSO_DATABASE_URL	Turso database URL (libsql://...). Unset = local SQLite file
TURSO_AUTH_TOKEN	Turso auth token
AUTH_SECRET	Auth.js session secret — openssl rand -base64 32
AUTH_DISCORD_ID	Discord OAuth app client ID
AUTH_DISCORD_SECRET	Discord OAuth app client secret
AUTH_GITHUB_ID	GitHub OAuth app client ID (unset hides the GitHub button)
AUTH_GITHUB_SECRET	GitHub OAuth app client secret
LIVEKIT_URL	LiveKit project URL (server side)
LIVEKIT_API_KEY	LiveKit API key
LIVEKIT_API_SECRET	LiveKit API secret
NEXT_PUBLIC_LIVEKIT_URL	LiveKit URL the browser connects to — must be the wss:// URL
BLOB_READ_WRITE_TOKEN	Vercel Blob token; auto-populated when you attach a Blob store on Vercel
NEXT_PUBLIC_SITE_URL	Canonical site URL, used for absolute links, sitemap, and OAuth callbacks

OAuth redirect URIs to register: <your-url>/api/auth/callback/discord and <your-url>/api/auth/callback/github.

Deployment

Deployed on Vercel. The build step runs Drizzle migrations against Turso automatically (scripts/migrate.mjs runs before next build), so a deploy with fresh schema changes just works — no separate migration step. Set the environment variables above in the Vercel project settings and push.