Try it out live: GitHubUnwrapped.com

A platform that generates a year in review video for each GitHub user. Built with Next.JS, Remotion and AWS Lambda.

Make your own

Want to make your own year in review for your users?

• Developers: Feel free to fork use this repository as a template! Note the legal disclaimers at the bottom of this README.
• Non-developers: Write to hi@remotion.dev for a free consultation in Fall 2023!

Setup

1. Run npm i to install dependencies.

2. Rename .env.example to .env

3. Set up your AWS account according to the Remotion Lambda Setup guide. We use multiple accounts for load-balancing:

   • Use AWS_KEY_1 instead of REMOTION_AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_1 instead of REMOTION_AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY.
   • You can use AWS_KEY_2 and AWS_SECRET_2 to load-balance between two accounts, or paste the same credentials as before to use the same account.
   • In src/set-env-for-key.ts, we rotate the environment variables.

4. Deploy the functions into your AWS account(s):

   npx ts-node deploy.ts
   

   Note that some AWS regions are disabled by default. If you get an error, enable them or limit yourself to only default ones.

5. For caching the videos and GitHub API responses, set up a MongoDB (We use a free MongoDB Atlas Cloud instance) to save the videos. Set the connection string as MONGO_URL.

6. For fetching data from GitHub, create a personal access token in your user settings (no need to grant any scopes, the GraphQL API needs to be authenticated to get public information) and set it as GITHUB_TOKEN_1. Adding more tokens GITHUB_TOKEN_2 etc. will rotate the personal access tokens.

7. Optionally, provide DISCORD_CHANNEL and DISCORD_TOKEN values to send monitoring logs to Discord.

You now have all environment variables.

Run the web app:

npm run dev

Edit the template in the Remotion preview:

npm run preview

To deploy, connect your repository to Vercel.

Don't forget to also set the environment variables there too.

Scaling strategy

To allow thousands of people to render their video at the same time, we applied multiple strategies for scaling:

• Caching the video whenever possible. Before each render, a MongoDB database lock is created to avoid multiple renders for the same GitHub user to be accidentally created.
• Renders are distributed across an array of AWS regions and accounts to avoid hitting the concurrency limit.

Credits

We thank GitHub for their support in realization and promotion of this project.

Music copyright disclaimer

The music was licensed for GitHubUnwrapped.com specifically. If you create a derivative project, you may not use it.

License

The code in this repository: Licensed under MIT.
The Remotion framework (a dependency of this project): Companies need to obtain a paid license. Read the terms here.