Developer Guide#

go-rtmp is a pure Go (1.21+) RTMP server with zero external dependencies. The architecture is a layered stack that mirrors the RTMP protocol itself — each layer only depends on the one below it, with no circular imports.

TCP → Handshake → Chunk → Control/AMF0 → RPC → Conn → Server

Every package under internal/rtmp/ maps to a single protocol concern. This makes the codebase easy to navigate once you understand the protocol layers.

Reading Order for New Contributors#

If you’re new to the project, read the code in this order:

  1. Architecture — understand the layers and data flow
  2. Design Principles — why decisions were made
  3. RTMP Protocol Reference — the wire format you’re implementing
  4. Testing Guide — how to validate your changes
  5. Contributing — workflow and conventions

Testing Philosophy#

The project follows a strict testing philosophy:

  • Golden binary vectors — exact wire-format .bin files validate every encoder and decoder against known-good byte sequences
  • Table-driven tests — every test case is a row in a struct slice, making it trivial to add new cases
  • No mocks — tests use real net.Pipe() connections for end-to-end validation through the actual protocol stack
  • Race detector — all CI runs use go test -race to catch concurrency bugs

This approach ensures that if the tests pass, the bytes on the wire are correct.

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