Jitsi

Make un-frustrating what is frustrating.

Jitsi is awesome. Point. Blank. Period.

Jitsi is not, however, easy for the layman (or even experienced admin) to set up or understand. with its ultramodular component structure and jvb pooling, it’s like… what? I’ve lately started to really come around to the idea of docker-composed apps. I like that they’re fairly portable, easily configurable, and just plain easy. The learning curve is a bit steep but the future is now and this seems to be what all the cool kids are doing. Systems Administration in the very near future is going to be… the topic of another article!

anyways, back to deploying jitsi:

The Server:

I’m using an AWS instance that I’ve got other docker applications running on. For the purposes of jitsi I’ll note that this is a t2.medium instance running Ubuntu 20.04 and that I’ve opened ports 80, 443, 10000, and 4443 in the security group. Port 443 will catch all of the virtualhosts, but 8080 needs to be open so that the docker network can bind to it, and redirect it’s own traffics, port 10000 if for webRTC (Real Time Communication) magicks…

Configuring Apache for jitsi:

This one is a bread and butter style redirect.

<VirtualHost *:80> ServerName jitsi.domain.name ProxyPreserveHost On # setup the proxy <Proxy *> Order allow,deny Allow from all </Proxy> ProxyPass / https://localhost:8443/ ProxyPassReverse / https://localhost:8443/ </VirtualHost> <VirtualHost *:443> ServerName jitsi.domain.name SSLEngine on SSLProxyEngine On SSLProxyVerify None SSLProxyCheckPeerCN Off SSLProxyCheckPeerName Off ProxyPreserveHost On ProxyPass / https://localhost:8443/ ProxyPassReverse / https://localhost:8443/ SSLCertificateFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/servername.domain.name/fullchain.pem SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/servername.voltpop.com/privkey.pem Include /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-apache.conf </VirtualHost>

Docker App Deployment In A Nutshell:

1) Grab source

wget https://github.com/jitsi/docker-jitsi-meet/archive/refs/tags/stable-5963.tar.gz

2) Unpack in /opt

~$ cd /opt ~$ tar xvf /root/stable-5963.tar.gz ~$ ln -s docker-jitsi-meet-stable-5963 jitsi ~$ cd jitsi

3) Configure docker-compose environment

~$ cp env.example .env ~$ vim .env // configure settings appropriately ~$ ./gen-passwords.sh

4) Configure the PUBLIC_URL and DOCKER_HOST_ADDRESS in the .env file.

5) Set up local filesystem and deploy the app

~$ mkdir -p ~/.jitsi-meet-cfg/{web/letsencrypt,transcripts,prosody/config,prosody/prosody-plugins-custom,jicofo,jvb,jigasi,jibri} ~$ docker-compose up

Certbot Magic:

Like I said before: I use this server with other docker apps. but I also like to use SSL so how does certbot handle updating the certificate with an additional domain name? like a boss, that’s how.

certbot certonly -d first.domain.com -d second.domain.com -d additional.domain.com

and then select e to expand the current certificate.