On-premise

Running UserView On-Premise

To run UserView on your infrastructure, you'll need to either run a Docker image that contains everything or host the components separately yourself.

If you have fewer than 5,000 Visitors online at any given time and no more than 100 concurrent Sessions, a single server will likely be enough. If you have more, you'll likely need to add more servers and scale UserView horizontally by having a separate Redis cluster.

docker run -d \
  -e BASE_ENDPOINT=https://cobrowsing.acmetech.com/ \
  -e LICENSE_KEY=https://api.upscope.io/v1.3/.... \
  -e SECRET_KEY=myrandomsecretkey... \
  -p 5002:5002 \
  upscope/onpremise

BASE_ENDPOINT=http://localhost:5002 PORT=5002 \
LICENSE_KEY=https://api.upscope.io/v1.3/.... \
SECRET_KEY=myrandomsecretkey... ./upscope-data-linux

Installing UserView on Your Website

After you run UserView, the output will give you instructions for your JavaScript SDK installation code. It looks like this (notice {BASE_ENDPOINT}):

<script>
  (function(w, u, d){if(typeof u!=="function"){var i=function(){i.c(arguments)};i.q=[];i.c=function(args){i.q.push(args)};
  w.Upscope=i;var l = function(){var s=d.createElement('script');s.type='text/javascript';s.async=true;
  s.src='{BASE_ENDPOINT}/upscope.js';var x=d.getElementsByTagName('script')[0];x.parentNode.insertBefore(s,x);};l();}}
  )(window, window.Upscope, document);
  Upscope('init');
  Upscope('getWatchLink', console.log);
</script>

You can add that code to pages like you would with our cloud solution.

Installing UserView in Your Mobile Apps

The iOS, Android, Flutter, and React Native SDKs connect to your on-premise instance when you set the onPremiseBaseEndpoint configuration option to your BASE_ENDPOINT. The SDK then fetches its configuration from {BASE_ENDPOINT}/sdk-config.json and connects to {BASE_ENDPOINT}/session instead of our cloud servers, so the region option is ignored.

let config = UpscopeConfiguration(
    apiKey: "YOUR_API_KEY",
    onPremiseBaseEndpoint: "https://cobrowsing.acmetech.com"
)

try Upscope.shared.initialize(with: config)

val config = UpscopeConfiguration.Builder("YOUR_API_KEY")
    .onPremiseBaseEndpoint("https://cobrowsing.acmetech.com")
    .build()

Upscope.initialize(applicationContext, config)

final config = UpscopeConfiguration(
  apiKey: 'YOUR_API_KEY',
  onPremiseBaseEndpoint: 'https://cobrowsing.acmetech.com',
);

await Upscope.instance.initialize(config);

import Upscope from "@upscopeio/react-native-sdk";

Upscope.initialize({
  apiKey: "YOUR_API_KEY",
  onPremiseBaseEndpoint: "https://cobrowsing.acmetech.com",
});

Everything else — installation, configuration options, and SDK functions — works exactly like the cloud version.

Your License Key

To run UserView, you'll need to retrieve your license key. The license key can be downloaded to your server or read automatically from our server every time the server starts.

You'll need to enter the license key into the LICENSE_KEY environment variable. The LICENSE_KEY environment variable can be one of:

• The license key content (note it's multi-line)
• A file path to the license key content
• The URL to the license key, the preferred method

If you don't have to restrict the instance's interactions with the internet, entering the URL provided on the dashboard as the LICENSE_KEY environment variable is preferable as you won't need to update it when it expires.

Configuration

The following is configurable through environment variables:

If you use MONGO_URI=mongodb://localhost/upscope with the Docker image, a MongoDB server will be installed inside the container to serve the application.

If you use redis://localhost/ with the Docker image, a Redis server will be installed inside the container to serve the application.

Session Video Recording

Your on-premise instance can record Sessions and render them to MP4, with the video files never leaving your infrastructure. For recording to work you need:

1. The session recording feature on your plan. It's embedded in your license key, so if you just added it, re-download the license key (or use the URL form of LICENSE_KEY) and restart the server.
2. MongoDB (MONGO_URI must not be disabled): Session events used for the replay are stored there.
3. For Sessions that include browser co-browsing, a separate Chromium container the server can reach over WebSocket. We test with the browserless Chromium image:

Then point your UserView instance at it with BROWSERLESS_ENDPOINT=ws://yourdockerhost:3000?token=mybrowserlesstoken. Sessions made only of screen sharing frames are rendered with ffmpeg directly and don't need the Chromium container (if you run the binaries instead of Docker, make sure ffmpeg is available on the PATH).

After a Session ends, our cloud asks your instance to render the recording (this requires the instance to be linked in your dashboard's on-premise settings) and stores only the resulting URL, which points at your storage.

Recordings can be stored on a local volume (the default) or on S3:

Recording file URLs are not guessable (they contain a UUID), matching the access model of our cloud storage.

Integrating with the Dashboard

To use the UserView dashboard with UserView on-premise, head to your on-prem settings and scroll down to cloud link.

You'll need to enter your BASE_ENDPOINT and your SECRET_KEY, and have an option to enter the email of who should be contacted if we need to reach out quickly if we find a vulnerability we can't patch from remote.

What Doesn't Work On-Premise?

Although we've made our on-premise version as similar as possible to the original, there are a few missing functionalities. You'll need to use UserView cloud if you are interested in:

• Integrations with live chat software (other than a simple link in the attributes)
• Screenshots
• IP geolocation features
• Audio/video communication