---
title: 'Introduction'
---

### Self Hosters READ:

Most sources marked with 🔥 or 🤝 are only avaliable on https://pstream.org

Because these scrapers are getting harder and harder to maintain, as they get patched. We need to close-source them. This is unfortunate, but it's the reality of the pirating scene. Sites that we scrape are blocking us, and we keep losing them. Fortunately, P-Stream has partnered with many people who offered their services on the site.
You are still free to self-host; several sources are still usable, with more open-source ones coming soon. If you have experience coding, this is a great oppurtunity to develop your own scrapers. 

# Introduction to the client

The client is what users sees when navigating to your domain, it's the main part of the application and houses the interface and all of the scraping logic.

## Progressive Web App

The client can be optionally ran as a [PWA](https://web.dev/explore/progressive-web-apps), which allows it to be installed on a mobile device. **This can be hard to do correctly and really hard if not almost impossible to reverse**, so it's generally not recommended to do so if you don't have experience hosting PWAs. If you understand the risks and still want to continue, then read more about it [here](../self-hosting/about-pwa.mdx).

## Configuration

The client features various configuration options, some of which are required for the client to function. [If you are using Vercel to host the client](./deploy.mdx#method-1-vercel-recommended), then the required variables are a necessary part of creating the site, if you're using another host, or hosting it for yourself, you'll need to set them up yourself.

You can view all of the configuration options on the [configurations page](./configuration.mdx).
