SDK quickstart

Agora provides two sample projects that demonstrate core IoT SDK functionality:

hello_rtsa: sends and receives media streams
hello_rtm: sends and receives signaling messages

The samples are bundled in the example directory of the IoT SDK package.

This page shows you how to compile and run the hello_rtsa sample project to start streaming audio and video.

IoT SDK for Android no longer receives version updates. For Android-based devices, integrate the RTC Java SDK together with the Signaling Java SDK instead of IoT SDK.

Prerequisites

To follow this procedure you need:

A computer or an embedded device. This page uses a computer running Ubuntu 18.04 as an example. For the full list of supported operating systems and toolchains, see Supported platforms.
An Agora account and project.
A temporary RTC token generated for your project.

A testing license is bundled with the sample project. It is valid for 90 days and supports up to 10 concurrent connections. To use IoT SDK in production, apply for and activate a commercial license.

Agora publishes a separate SDK package for each combination of processor architecture, operating system, C library, and float ABI. The package name encodes these values, for example armv7a-linux-uclibceabihf is an ARMv7 package for Linux, built with the uClibc C library and hard-float compilation.

Download the package that matches your development machine's architecture, C library, and float ABI. For example, to download and extract the x86_64-linux-gnu package from the terminal:

wget https://download.agora.io/rtsasdk/release/Agora-RTSALite-<build-id>-x86_64-linux-gnu-v<version>.tgz
tar xvf Agora-RTSALite-<build-id>-x86_64-linux-gnu-v<version>.tgz

Replace <build-id> and <version> with the values from your downloaded file name. See Resources for the naming convention used across architectures.

Compile the example project

In the terminal, compile the example project for your architecture:

cd agora_rtsa_sdk/example
./build-x86_64.sh

This produces two executables in out/x86_64: hello_rtsa, for streaming audio and video, and hello_rtm, for signaling.

To run hello_rtsa on an ARM Linux device, first see the porting guide (PORTING.md) included in the SDK package.

Run the media streaming example

Navigate to the output directory and launch hello_rtsa with your App ID, a channel name, and your temporary token:

cd out/x86_64
./hello_rtsa -i <your-app-id> -c demo_channel --token <your-rtc-token>

The app joins the channel demo_channel and streams the sample media files bundled with the SDK (send_video.h264 for H.264 video and send_audio_16k_1ch.pcm for PCM audio), using default parameters.

Verify the result

In your browser, navigate to the Agora web demo and initialize it with your App ID.
Enter the same channel name (demo_channel), a user ID, and a token for that channel, then click Join.
You see and hear the audio and video streamed from your running hello_rtsa instance.

Run the signaling example

hello_rtm demonstrates sending and receiving signaling messages between two peers. Open two terminals and launch one instance in each, using a distinct RTM token and user ID for each side:

./hello_rtm --appId <your-app-id> --rtmUid user1 --peerUid user2 --token <rtm-token-for-user1>

./hello_rtm --appId <your-app-id> --rtmUid user2 --peerUid user1 --token <rtm-token-for-user2>

You see each terminal send and receive messages from the other peer.