flock

[!IMPORTANT]

🚧 In active development 🚧

I use flock every day while I build it, and master moves fast. Now and then a commit breaks something; a fix usually follows within hours. If something stops working, check the latest commits or pull again later.

flock schedules a video out to YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and Facebook, with its own text and its own release time for each platform.

• Write for each platform separately. YouTube takes a title and a description, Instagram, TikTok and Facebook a caption.
• Automate the edits you always make. Each platform can have "replace X with Y" rules, applied when you confirm.
• See exactly what goes out before anything is sent.
• Your PC can be off at release time. The video and the schedule go to a PocketBase instance (on a NAS, say), and a worker publishes from there.

All four publish for real. Facebook takes reels on a Page.

Requirements

• Node 22+ and pnpm
• A PocketBase instance of its own, reachable from your PC and from the machine the worker runs on (port 8091 in the examples)
• A developer app for each platform you want to publish to — see The worker

Install

Get the code:

git clone https://github.com/Chrotesque/flock.git
cd flock
pnpm install

Put the PocketBase superuser details in scripts/.pb-creds.json:

{ "url": "http://<host>:8091", "email": "[email protected]", "password": "…" }

Create the collections. This is safe to re-run; run it again after every update, since a new version may add collections or fields:

pnpm setup-pb

Point the app at the same instance in .env (start from .env.example):

PUBLIC_POCKETBASE_URL=http://<host>:8091

Run the app

For development:

pnpm dev

To publish it, set FLOCK_DEPLOY_DEST in .env to PocketBase's pb_public folder, then:

pnpm deploy

This builds the app and mirrors it into that folder. PocketBase serves it straight away, with no restart.

[!WARNING] The mirror deletes anything in that folder that is not part of the build. Point it only at a pb_public that belongs to flock. pnpm deploy:dry shows what would change.

From flock's website. The same page also opens at https://flock-scheduler.netlify.app/app/. It asks once for your server's address (the one flock opens at), keeps it in that browser, and talks only to that server. The browser has to reach the server over https, and it needs a profile picked again there, since to the browser it is a new site. Change… under Settings → Storage and defaults names another server.

pnpm build:site builds that copy into site/app/ and zips site/ into site/site.zip, ready to upload to a static host.

Showing flock inside another site (iframe):

1. Copy pb_hooks/strip_xframe.pb.js into PocketBase's pb_hooks/ folder (a container mounts it at /pb/pb_hooks).
2. Set FLOCK_FRAME_ANCESTORS in PocketBase's environment to that site's origin.
3. Restart PocketBase.

The worker

Confirming an upload only queues it. The worker is a separate process that keeps running when no browser is open. It:

• publishes each release. YouTube gets the video right away and releases it at the slot itself; TikTok and Instagram are held until their slot.
• lists the watch and project folders, copies videos from your PC to the network, and files finished videos into their NAS folder.
• reads YouTube's, Instagram's, TikTok's and Facebook's numbers for the Dashboard (followers included),
• looks up the TikTok accounts a caption @mentions, so the compose screen shows whose each one is before it goes out, and
• scores titles with vidIQ if you set that up.

A platform you have not set up just leaves its releases waiting in the queue.

Start from the example config. It will hold your client secrets, and git ignores it:

cp worker/.worker-config.example.json worker/.worker-config.json

YouTube

In the Google Cloud console:

1. Create a project and enable YouTube Data API v3 and YouTube Analytics API (APIs & Services → Library).
2. Set up the OAuth consent screen as External, and add each Google account that owns a channel as a test user.
3. Under Credentials, create an OAuth client ID of type Desktop app.

Put the client ID and secret in the config, then connect a channel:

pnpm worker:auth

Run it once per channel. pnpm worker:youtube lists the channels the worker can upload to; with several, each brand picks its own in Settings → Brands.

Good to know:

This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗