Technical guides, API reference, and setup walkthroughs.
Get Glitch Server running in under 5 minutes. Download, install, point it at your ROM library, and start streaming to any browser on your network. No complex configuration required — just install and play.
Deep dive into every server setting: HTTP and WebRTC ports, transcoding profiles, library scan paths, environment variables, hardware acceleration, logging levels, and authentication options. Make Glitch run exactly the way you want.
Full REST API documentation for the Glitch Server. Endpoints cover library management (list, search, metadata), session control (start, stop, pause), save state CRUD, user management, and real-time WebSocket events for live session monitoring.
Understand how Glitch streams games in real time. This guide covers the signaling flow, ICE candidate negotiation, TURN/STUN relay configuration, the FFmpeg encoding pipeline, and how libretro cores feed frames into the WebRTC media track.
Step-by-step deployment instructions for Docker, Docker Compose, cloud VMs (AWS, GCP, Azure, Hetzner), Raspberry Pi, Synology NAS, Unraid, and TrueNAS. Includes sample compose files, reverse proxy configs for Nginx and Caddy, and SSL setup.
Want to help build Glitch? This guide covers the development environment setup, code style conventions, how to add a new libretro core, the PR review process, and our contributor license agreement. Open source contributions are always welcome.
The glitch-api-sdk is available on npm and provides a typed TypeScript client for every Glitch Server API endpoint. Install it with npm install glitch-api-sdk and connect to your server in a few lines of code. The SDK handles authentication, session management, and WebSocket event subscriptions out of the box.
For command-line workflows, the Glitch CLI lets you manage your server, scan libraries, trigger backups, and monitor active sessions directly from your terminal. Perfect for headless deployments and automation scripts.
Glitch Server is a Node.js/TypeScript application built on a modular architecture designed for performance and extensibility.
Express API Layer — Handles all HTTP requests, serves the web client, and manages authentication via JWT tokens. Routes cover library browsing, session control, user management, and save state operations.
Libretro FFI Bridge — Interfaces with libretro cores through a native addon, managing core lifecycle, frame capture, audio sampling, and input injection at full emulation speed.
FFmpeg Pipeline — Encodes raw frames from the libretro bridge into H.264 or VP8 streams with configurable quality, resolution, and hardware acceleration support (NVENC, VAAPI, VideoToolbox).
WebRTC Signaling — Negotiates peer connections between server and clients, handles ICE candidates, and manages TURN/STUN relay for NAT traversal when streaming outside the local network.