Video Conference with Jitsi Meet

Getting a video conference system up and running in such a short time is easy with Jitsi Meet, a Free and Open Source Software. Successful installation will give you a voice, video, chat and screen sharing service. Not only that you can use it right away, you can also take a look at their source codes and customize it to suit your needs relatively easy.

Let’s do it. Prepare an Ubuntu Server 18.04, get it online with IP public, set DNS and point a hostname/domain to it. Login to your server via SSH. Once you logged in you can begin Jitsi Meet installation.

Install Jitsi Meet

Before we start, these are the requirements:

  • You have installed Ubuntu Server 18.04
  • Your Ubuntu Server have an IP public
  • You have set your domain DNS to point a hostname to your Ubuntu Server IP address

For example, I have setup a droplet in DigitalOcean and point my domain to the droplet’s IP. Here is my setup:

I picked the cheapest one for testing this article, you should too, you can increase it later.

OK, let’s start.

Add Jitsi repository:

wget -qO - https://download.jitsi.org/jitsi-key.gpg.key | sudo apt-key add -
sudo sh -c "echo 'deb https://download.jitsi.org stable/' > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/jitsi-stable.list"

Update and upgrade Ubuntu:

sudo apt -y update
sudo apt -y upgrade

Install Jitsi Meet:

sudo apt install jitsi-meet

Notes:

You will be asked the domain name for your video conference service, that is the hostname/domain you have pointed to your Jitsi Meet server’s IP address. After that, for other question during installation like SSL certificate just choose default option.

Next, get a free SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt:

/usr/share/jitsi-meet/scripts/install-letsencrypt-cert.sh

Put your email and request for the cert, wait until it’s done.

Installation done

And that’s it, Jitsi Meet is ready. You can browse (https) your Jitsi Meet and start video conferencing.

You will be using your browser to do video conference, make sure that you have allowed Jitsi Meet to use your Camera and Microphone via your browser. Just browse it, Jitsi Meet will asked for permissions.

Configurations are in /etc/jitsi/ and to customize the web interface you can start by navigating to /usr/share/jitsi-meet/ and edit *.js files, see what’s changing, refresh your browser.

References

Visit these references for more information about Jitsi Meet:

If you only need to use a video conference for free, you can check Jitsi Meet in action in https://meet.jit.si