My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Slackware Cloud Server Series, Episode 3: Video Conferencing

Hi all!
This is already the third episode in a series of articles I am writing about using Slackware as your private/personal ‘cloud server’. Time flies when you’re having fun.
We’re still waiting for Slackware 15.0 and in the meantime, I thought I’d speed up the release of my article on Video Conferencing. My initial plan was to release one article per week after Slackware 15 had been made available. The latter still did not happen (unstuck in time again?) but then I realized, an article about Docker and another about Keykloak still won’t give you something tangible and productive to run and use. So here is Episode 3, a couple of days earlier than planned, to spend your lazy sunday on: create your own video conferencing platform.
Episodes 4 and 5 won’t be far off, since I have already written those as well.

Check out the list below which shows past, present and future episodes in the series, if the article has already been written you’ll be able to click on the subject.
The first episode also contains an introduction with some more detail about what you can expect.

  • Episode 1: Managing your Docker Infrastructure
  • Episode 2: Identity and Access management (IAM)
  • Episode 3 (this article): Video Conferencing
    Setting up Jitsi Meet – the Open Source video conferencing platform. This makes us independent of cloud conferencing services like MS Teams, Zoom or Google Meet. The Jitsi login is offloaded to our Keycloak IAM provider.

    • Jitsi Meet on Docker
    • Preamble
    • Initial Configuration
    • Adding Etherpad integration
    • Creating application directories
    • Starting Jitsi Meet
    • Considerations about the “.env” file
    • Upgrading Docker-Jitsi-Meet
    • Apache reverse proxy setup
    • Fixing Etherpad integration
    • Network troubleshooting
    • Creating internal Jitsi accounts
    • Connecting Jitsi and Keycloak
      • Adding jitsi-keycloak
      • Configuration of jitsi-keycloak in the Keycloak Admin console
      • Remaining configuration done in jitsi-keycloak
    • Configure docker-jitsi-meet for use of jitsi-keycloak
    • Firing up the bbq
    • Thanks
    • Attribution
  • Episode 4: Productivity Platform
  • Episode 5: Collaborative document editing
  • Episode 6: Etherpad with Whiteboard
  • Episode 7: Decentralized Social Media
  • Episode X: Docker Registry

Secure Video Conferencing

Actually, my original interest in Docker was raised in the beginning of 2020 when the Corona pandemic was new, everybody was afraid and people were sent home to continue work and school activities from there.
One of the major challenges for people was to stay connected. Zoom went from a fairly obscure program to a hugely popular video conferencing platform in no time at all (until severe security flaws made a fair-sized dent in its reputation); Microsoft positioned its Teams platform as the successor of Skype but targets mostly corporate users; Google Hangouts became Google Meet and is nowadays the video conferencing platform of choice for all corporations that have not yet been caught in the Microsoft vendor lock-in.
None of these conferencing platforms are open source and all of them are fully cloud-hosted and are inseparable from privacy concerns. In addition, un-paid use of these platforms imposes some levels of limitation to the size and quality of your meetings. As a user, you do not have control at all.

Enter Jitsi, whose Jitsi Meet platform is available for everybody to use online for free and without restrictions. Not just free, but Open Source, end-to-end encrypted communication and you can host the complete infrastructure on hardware that you own and control.
People do not even have to create an account in order to participate – the organizer can share a URL with everyone who (s)he wants to join a session.

Jitsi is not as widely known as Zoom, and that is a pity. Therefore this Episode in my Slackware Cloud Server series will focus on getting Jitsi Meet up and running on your server, and we will let login be handled by the Keycloak Identity and Access Management (IAM) tool which we have learnt to setup in the previous Episode.

In early 2020, when it became clear that our Slackware coreteam member Alphageek (Erik Jan Tromp) would not stay with us for long due to a terminal illness, I went looking for a private video conferencing platform for our Slackware team and found Jitsi Meet.
I had no success in getting it to work on my Slackware server unfortunately. Jitsi Meet is a complex product made of several independent pieces of software which need to be configured ‘just right‘ to make them work together properly. I failed. I was not able to make it work in time to let alphageek use it.
But I also noticed that Jitsi Meet was offered as a Docker-based solution. That was the start of a learning process full of blood sweat & tears which culminated in this article series.

With this article I hope to give you a jump-start in getting your personal video conferencing platform up and running. I will focus on the basic required functionality but I will leave some of the more advanced scenarios for you to investigate: session recording; automatic subtitling of spoken word; integrating VOIP telephony; to name a few.

Jitsi Meet on Docker

Docker-Jitsi-Meet is a Jitsi Github project which uses Docker Compose to create a fully integrated Jitsi application stack which works out of the box. All internal container-to-container configurations are pre-configured.

As you can see from the picture below, the only network ports that need to be accessible from the outside are the HTTPS port (TCP port 443) of your webserver, UDP port 10000 for the WebRTC (video) connections and optionally (not discussed in my article) UDP port range 20000 – 20050 for allowing VOIP telephones to take part in Jitsi meetings.

These ports need to be opened in your server firewall.

Installing docker-jitsi-meet is relatively straight-forward if you go the quick-start page and follow the instructions to the letter. Integrating Jitsi with Keycloak involves using a connector which is not part of either programs; I will show you how to connect them all.

You will be running all of this in Docker containers eventually, but there’s stuff to download, edit and create first. I did not say it was trivial…

Preamble

For the sake of this instruction, I will use the hostname “https://meet.darkstar.lan” as the URL where users will connect to their conferences; The server’s public IP address will be “10.10.10.10“.
Furthermore, “https://sso.meet.darkstar.lan” will be the URL for the connector between Jitsi and Keycloak and “https://sso.darkstar.lan/auth” is the Keycloak base URL (see Episode 2 for how we did the Keycloak setup).

Setting up your domain (which will hopefully be something else than “darkstar.lan”…) with new hostnames and then setting up web servers for the hostnames in that domain is an exercise left to the reader. Before continuing, please ensure that your equivalents for the following two hosts have a web server running. They don’t have to serve any content yet but we will add some blocks of configuration to their VirtualHost definitions during the steps outlined in the remainder of this article:

  • meet.darkstar.lan
  • sso.meet.darkstar.lan

I expect that your Keycloak application is already running at your own real-life equivalent of https://sso.darkstar.lan/auth .

Using a  Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate to provide encrypted connections (HTTPS) to your webserver is documented in an earlier blog article.

Note that I am talking about webserver “hosts” but in fact, all of these are just virtual webservers running on the same machine, at the same IP address, served by the same Apache httpd program, but with different DNS entries. There is no need at all for multiple computers when setting up your Slackware Cloud server.

Initial Configuration

Download and extract the tarball of the latest stable release: https://github.com/jitsi/docker-jitsi-meet/releases/latest into the “/usr/local/” directory. Basically any directory will do but I am already backing up /usr/local so the Jitsi stuff will automatically be taken into backup with all the rest.
At the moment of writing, the latest stable version number is ‘6826‘. Which means, after extracting the tarball we do:

cd /usr/local/docker-jitsi-meet-stable-6826/

A Jitsi Meet container stack for Docker Compose is defined in the file “docker-compose.yml” which you find in this directory.
In addition to this YAML file, the ‘docker-compose‘ program parses a file named “.env” if it exists in the same directory. Its content is used to initialize the container environment. You can for instance store passwords and other secrets in “.env” but also all the configuration variables that define how your stack will function.
Docker-Jitsi-Meet ships an example environment file containing every configurable option, but mostly commented-out.

Configuration:

We start with creating a configuration file “.env” from the example file “env.example“:

$ cp -i env.example .env

And then edit the “.env” file to define our desired configuration.

First of all,

  • Change “CONFIG=~/.jitsi-meet-cfg” to “CONFIG=/usr/share/docker/data/jitsi-meet-cfg” because I do not want application data in my user’s or root’s homedirectory.

Then the ones that are easy to understand:

  • Change “HTTP_PORT=8000” to "HTTP_PORT=8440” because port 8000 is used by far too many applications. Port 8440 is what we will use again in the reverse proxy configuration.
  • Change “TZ=UTC” to “TZ=Europe/Amsterdam” or whatever timezone your server is in.
  • Change “#PUBLIC_URL=https://meet.example.com” to “PUBLIC_URL=https://meet.darkstar.lan/” i.e. change it to the URL where you want people to connect. The connections will be handled by your Apache httpd server who will manage the traffic back and forth between Jitsi container and the client.
  • Change “#DOCKER_HOST_ADDRESS=192.168.1.1” to “DOCKER_HOST_ADDRESS=10.10.10.10” where of course “10.10.10.10” needs to be replaced by your server’s actual public Internet IP address.

Other settings that I would explicitly enable but their commented-out values are the default values anyway (matter of taste, it avoids getting bitten by a future change in application default settings):

  • ENABLE_LOBBY=1“; “ENABLE_PREJOIN_PAGE=1“; “ENABLE_WELCOME_PAGE=1“; “ENABLE_BREAKOUT_ROOMS=1“; “ENABLE_NOISY_MIC_DETECTION=1“.

IPv6 Network consideration:

  • Change “#ENABLE_IPV6=1” to “ENABLE_IPV6=0” if your Docker installation has ipv6 disabled. This is a requirement if your host server would have ipv6 disabled.
    You can find out whether ipv6 is disabled in Docker, because in that case the file “/etc/docker/daemon.json” will contain this statement:

    { "ipv6": false }

Connection encryption:

  • Change “#DISABLE_HTTPS=1” to “DISABLE_HTTPS=1“. We disable HTTPS in the container because we will again use Apache http reverse proxy to handle encryption.
  • Change “#ENABLE_LETSENCRYPT=1” to “ENABLE_LETSENCRYPT=0” because we do not want the container to handle automatic certificate renewals – it’s just too much of a hassle on a server where you already run a webserver on ports 80 and 443. Our Apache reverse proxy is equipped with a Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate and I want to handle SSL certificate renewals centrally – on the host.

Authentication:

The authentication will be offloaded to Keycloak using JSON Web Tokens aka ‘JWT‘ for the inter-process communication. The following variables in “.env” need to be changed:

  • #ENABLE_AUTH=1” should become “ENABLE_AUTH=1
  • #ENABLE_GUESTS=1” should become “ENABLE_GUESTS=1
  • #AUTH_TYPE=internal” should become “AUTH_TYPE=jwt
  • TOKEN_AUTH_URL=https://auth.meet.example.com/{room}” should become “TOKEN_AUTH_URL=https://sso.meet.darkstar.lan/{room}
  • #JWT_APP_ID=my_jitsi_app_id” should become “JWT_APP_ID=jitsi
  • #JWT_APP_SECRET=my_jitsi_app_secret” should become “JWT_APP_SECRET=NmjPGpn+NjTe7oQUV9YqfaXiBULcsxYj

Actually, to avoid confusion: my proposed value of “JWT_APP_SECRET" (the string “NmjPGpn+NjTe7oQUV9YqfaXiBULcsxYj”) is a value which you will be generating yourself a few sections further down. It is a string which is used by two applications to establish mutual trust in their intercommunication.

We will re-visit the meaning and values of JWT_APP_ID and JWT_APP_SECRET in a moment.

When our modifications to the “.env” file are complete, we run a script which will fill the values for all PASSWORD variables with random strings (this can be done at any time really):

$ ./gen-passwords.sh

Adding Etherpad integration

Etherpad is an online editor for real-time collaboration. The Docker version of Jitsi Meet is able to integrate Etherpad into your video conferences. I am going to show you how to run Etherpad on your Slackware Cloud server and integrate collaborative editing into your video meetings.

The git checkout of ‘docker-jitsi-meet‘ into /usr/local/docker-jitsi-meet-stable-6826/will have given you not only a docker-compose.yml file which starts Jitsi and its related containers, but also a file etherpad.yml. This is a Docker Compose file which starts an Etherpad container and connects it to the Jitsi Meet container stack.
FYI: you can use Docker Compose to process multiple YAML files in one command-line instead of implicitly processing only the ‘docker-compose.yml’ file (which happens if you do not explicitly mention the YAML filename in a “-f” parameter).
For instance if you wanted to start Jitsi and Etherpad together, you would use a command like this, using two “-f” parameters to specify the two YAML files:

# docker-compose -f docker-compose.yml -f etherpad.yml up -d

But I found out the hard way that this is risky.
Because sometime in the future you may want to bring that container stack down, for instance to upgrade Jitsi Meet to the latest version. If you forget that you had actually started two stacks (I consider the ‘etherpad.yml’ as the source for a second stack ) and you simply run “docker-compose down” in the directory… then only the Jitsi Meet stack will be brought down and Etherpad will happily keep running.
To protect myself from my future self, I have copied the content of ‘etherpad.yml‘ and added it to the bottom of ‘docker-compose.yml‘, so that I can simply run:

# docker-compose up -d

I leave it up to you to pick either scenario. Whatever works best for you.

Now on to the stuff that needs fixing because the standard configuration will not result in a working Etherpad integration.
First of all, add a “ports” configuration to expose the Etherpad port outside of the container. This is how that looks in the YAML file:

# Etherpad: real-time collaborative document editing
etherpad:
    image: etherpad/etherpad:1.8.6
    restart: ${RESTART_POLICY}
    ports:
        - '127.0.0.1:9001:9001'
    environment:
        - TITLE=${ETHERPAD_TITLE}
        - DEFAULT_PAD_TEXT=${ETHERPAD_DEFAULT_PAD_TEXT}
        - SKIN_NAME=${ETHERPAD_SKIN_NAME}
        - SKIN_VARIANTS=${ETHERPAD_SKIN_VARIANTS}
networks:
    meet.jitsi:
        aliases:
            - etherpad.meet.jitsi

You will also have to edit the “.env” file a bit more. Look for the ETHERPAD related variables and set them like so:

# Set etherpad-lite URL in docker local network (uncomment to enable)
ETHERPAD_URL_BASE=http://etherpad.meet.jitsi:9001
# Set etherpad-lite public URL, including /p/ pad path fragment (uncomment to enable)
ETHERPAD_PUBLIC_URL=https://meet.darkstar.lan/pad/p/
# Name your etherpad instance!
ETHERPAD_TITLE=Slackware EtherPad Chat
# The default text of a pad
ETHERPAD_DEFAULT_PAD_TEXT="Welcome to Slackware Web Chat!\n\n"

The most important setting is highlighted in green: “https://meet.darkstar.lan/pad/p/” . This is the external URL where we will expose our Etherpad. Since the Docker container exposes Etherpad only at the localhost address “127.0.0.1:9001” we need to setup yet another Apache reverse proxy. See the section “Apache reverse proxy setup” below.
There is one potential snag and you have to consider the implications: in the above proposed setup we expose Etherpad in the “/pad/” subdirectory of our Jitsi Meet server. But the Jitsi conference rooms also are exposed as a subdirectory, but then without the trailing slash. Which means everything will work just fine as long as nobody decides to call her conference room “pad” – that can lead to unexpected side effects. You could remedy that by choosing a more complex string than “/pad/” for Etherpad, or else setup a separate web host (for instance “etherpad.darkstar.lan“) just for Etherpad.

In any case, with all the preliminaries taken care of, you can continue with the next sections of the article.
Note: After starting the containers, you will have to do one last edit in the configuration of Jitsi Meet to actually make Etherpad available in your videomeetings. See the section “Fixing Etherpad integration” below.

I am still investigating the integration of Keycloak authentication with Etherpad. Once I am sure I have a working setup, I will do a write-up on the subject in a future article in this series. In the meantime, you need to realize that your Etherpad is publicly accessible.

Creating application directories

The various Docker containers that make up Docker-Jitsi-Meet need to write data which should persist across reboots. The “CONFIG” variable in “.env” points to the root of that directory structure and we need to create the empty directory tree manually before firing up the containers.
Using one smart command which will be expanded by Bash to a lot of ‘mkdir‘ commands:

# mkdir -p /usr/share/docker/data/jitsi-meet-cfg/{web/letsencrypt,transcripts,prosody/config,proso
dy/prosody-plugins-custom,jicofo,jvb,jigasi,jibri}

Starting Jitsi Meet

# cd /usr/local/docker-jitsi-meet-stable-*
# docker-compose up -d

With an output that will look somewhat like:

Creating network "docker-jitsi-meet-stable-4548-1_meet.jitsi" with the default driver
Creating docker-jitsi-meet-stable-4548-1_prosody_1 ... done
Creating docker-jitsi-meet-stable-4548-1_web_1 ... done
Creating docker-jitsi-meet-stable-4548-1_jicofo_1 ...
Creating docker-jitsi-meet-stable-4548-1_jvb_1 ...
...
Pulling web (jitsi/web:stable-4548-1)...
stable-4548-1: Pulling from jitsi/web
b248fa9f6d2a: Pull complete
173b15edefe3: Pull complete
3242417dae3a: Pull complete
331e7c5436be: Pull complete
6418fea5411e: Pull complete
0123aaecd2d8: Pull complete
bd0655288f32: Pull complete
f2905e1ad808: Pull complete
8bcc7f5a0af7: Pull complete
20878400e460: Extracting [====================================> ]
84.67MB/114.9MBB
..... etcetera

And that’s it. Our Jitsi Meet video conferencing platform is up and running.
But it is not yet accessible: we still need to connect the container stack to the outside world. This is achieved by adding an Apache httpd reverse proxy between our Docker stack and the users. See below!

 

Considerations about the “.env” file

Note that the “.env” file is only used the very first time ‘docker-compose‘ starts up your docker-jitsi-meet container stack, in order to  populate /usr/share/docker/data/jitsi-meet-cfg/ and its subdirectories.

After that initial start of the docker-jitsi-meet container stack you can tweak your setup by editing files in the /usr/share/docker/data/jitsi-meet-cfg/ directory tree, since these directories are mounted inside the various containers that make up Docker-Jitsi-Meet.
But if you ever edit that “.env” file again… you need to remove and re-create the directories below /usr/share/docker/data/jitsi-meet-cfg/ and restart the container stack.

NOTE: ‘docker-compose stop‘ stops all containers in the stack which was originally created by the ‘docker-compose up -d‘ command. Using ‘down‘ instead of ‘stop‘ will additionally remove containers and networks as defined in the Compose file(s). After using ‘down‘ you would have to use ‘up -d‘ instead of ‘start‘ to bring the stack back online.

This is how you deal with “.env” configuration changes:

# cd /usr/local/docker-jitsi-meet-stable-*
# docker-compose stop
# vi .env
# ... make your changes
# rm -rf /usr/share/docker/data/jitsi-meet-cfg/
# mkdir -p /usr/share/docker/data/jitsi-meet-cfg/{web/letsencrypt,transcripts,prosody/config,prosody/prosody-plugins-custom,jicofo,jvb,jigasi,jibri}
# docker-compose start

Upgrading Docker-Jitsi-Meet

You don’t need to follow the above process if you want to upgrade Docker-Jitsi-Meet to the latest stable release as part of life cycle management, but with an un-changed.env” file. In such a case, you simply execute:

# cd /usr/local/docker-jitsi-meet-stable-*
# docker-compose down
# docker-compose pull
# docker-compose up -d

Apache reverse proxy setup

We need to connect the users of our Jitsi and Etherpad services to the containers. Since these containers are exposed by Docker only at the loopback address (127.0.0.1 aka localhost) we use the Apache httpd’s ‘reverse proxy‘ feature.

These three blocks of text need to be added to the VirtualHost definition for your “meet.darkstar.lan” webserver so that it can act as a reverse proxy and connects your users to the Docker Jitsi Meet and Etherpad containers:

Generic block:

SSLProxyEngine on
RequestHeader set X-Forwarded-Proto "https"
ProxyTimeout 900
ProxyVia On
ProxyRequests Off
ProxyPreserveHost On
Options FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
allow from all

Specific to Jitsi Meet:

<Location />
    ProxyPass http://127.0.0.1:8440/
    ProxyPassReverse http://127.0.0.1:8440/
</Location>
# Do not forget WebSocket proxy:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP:Connection} Upgrade [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP:Upgrade} websocket [NC]
RewriteRule ^/?(.*) "ws://127.0.0.1:8440/$1" [P,L]

And specific to Etherpad:

<Location /pad/>
    ProxyPass http://127.0.0.1:9001/ retry=0 timeout=30
    ProxyPassReverse http://127.0.0.1:9001/
    AddOutputFilterByType SUBSTITUTE text/html
    Substitute "s|meet.darkstar.lan/|meet.darkstar.lan/pad/|i" 
</Location>
<Location pad/socket.io>
    # This is needed to handle websocket transport through the proxy, since
    # etherpad does not use a specific sub-folder, such as /ws/
    # to handle this kind of traffic.
    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} transport=websocket [NC]
    RewriteRule /(.*) ws://127.0.0.1:9001/socket.io/$1 [P,L]
    ProxyPass http://127.0.0.1:9001/socket.io retry=0 timeout=30
    ProxyPassReverse http://127.0.0.1:9001/socket.io
    AddOutputFilterByType SUBSTITUTE text/html
    Substitute "s|meet.darkstar.lan/|meet.darkstar.lan/pad/|i" 
</Location>

In “127.0.0.1:8440” you will recognize the TCP port 8440 which we configured for the Jitsi container in the “.env" file earlier. The “127.0.0.1:9001” corresponds to the port 9001 which we exposed explicitly in the ‘docker-compose.yml‘ file for the Etherpad service.

After adding this reverse proxy configuration and restarting Apache httpd. your video conference server will be publicly accessible at https://meet.darkstar.nl/ .

Fixing Etherpad integration

I told you earlier that you needed to make a final edit after the Jitsi Meet stack is up & running to fix the Etherpad integration.
Open the stack’s global config file “/opt/jitsi-meet-cfg/web/config.js” in your editor and look for this section of text:

// If set, add a "Open shared document" link to the bottom right menu that
// will open an etherpad document.
// etherpad_base: 'https://meet.darkstar.lan/pad/p/',

You need to un-comment the last line so that this section looks like:

// If set, add a "Open shared document" link to the bottom right menu that
// will open an etherpad document.
etherpad_base: 'https://meet.darkstar.lan/pad/p/',

It’s a long-standing bug apparently.
Now, when you join a Jitsi Meeting, the menu which opens when you click the three-dots “more actions” menu in the bar at the bottom of your screen, will contain an item “Open shared document“:

If you select this, your video will be replaced by an Etherpad “pad” with the name of your Jitsi meeting room.

Externally i.e. outside of the Jitsi videomeeting, your Etherpad ‘pad‘ will be available as “https://meet.darkstar.lan/pad/p/jitsiroom” where “jitsiroom” is the name you gave your Jitsi videomeeting aka ‘room‘. This means that people outside of your videomeeting can still collaborate with you in real-time.

Network troubleshooting

Docker’s own dynamic management of iptables chains and rulesets will be thwarted if you decide to restart your host firewall. The custom Docker chains disappear and the docker daemon gets confused. If you get these errors in logfiles when starting the Docker-Jitsi-Meet containers, simply restart the docker daemon itself (/etc/rc.d/rc.docker restart):

> driver failed programming external connectivity on endpoint docker-jitsi-meet
> iptables failed
> iptables: No chain/target/match by that name

Creating internal Jitsi accounts

Just for reference, in case you want to play with Jitsi before integrating it with Keycloak.
Internal Jitsi users must be created with the “prosodyctl” utility in the prosody container.

In order to run that command, you need to first start a shell in the corresponding container – and you need to do this from within the extracted tarball directory “/usr/local/docker-jitsi-meet-stable-*“:

# cd /usr/local/docker-jitsi-meet-stable-*
# docker-compose exec prosody /bin/bash

Once you are at the prompt of that shell in the container, run the following command to create a user:

> prosodyctl --config /config/prosody.cfg.lua register TheDesiredUsername meet.jitsi TheDesiredPassword

Note that the command produces no output. Example for a new user ‘alien‘:

> prosodyctl --config /config/prosody.cfg.lua register alien meet.jitsi WelcomeBOB!

Now user “alien” will be able to login to Jitsi Meet and start a video conference.

Connecting Jitsi and Keycloak

The goal is of course to move to a Single Sign On solution instead of using local accounts. Jitsi supports JWT Tokens which it should get from a OAuth/OpenID provider. We have Keycloak lined up for that, since it supports OAuth, OpenID, SAML and more.

Adding jitsi-keycloak

Using Keycloak as OAuth provider for Jitsi Meet is not directly possible, since unfortunately Keycloak’s JWT token is not 100% compatible with Jitsi. So a ‘middleware‘ is needed, and jitsi-keycloak fills that gap.

We will download the middleware from their git repository and setup a local directory below “/usr/share/docker/data” where we have been storing configurations for all our applications so far. All we are going to use from that repository checkout is the Docker Compose file you can find in there. The actual ‘jitsi-keycloak‘ middleware will eventually be running as yet another Docker container.

# cd /usr/local/
# git clone https://github.com/d3473r/jitsi-keycloak jitsi-keycloak
# mkdir -p /usr/share/docker/data/jitsi-keycloak/config
# cp ./jitsi-keycloak/example/docker-compose.yml /usr/share/docker/data/jitsi-keycloak/

Edit our working copy ‘/usr/share/docker/data/jitsi-keycloak/docker-compose.yml‘ to provide the correct environment variables for our instances of our already running Jitsi and Keycloak containers:

# --- start ---
version: '3'

services:
    jitsi-keycloak:
    image: d3473r/jitsi-keycloak
    container_name: jisi-keycloak
    hostname: jisi-keycloak
    restart: always
environment:
    JITSI_SECRET: NmjPGpn+NjTe7oQUV9YqfaXiBULcsxYj
    DEFAULT_ROOM: welcome
    JITSI_URL: https://meet.darkstar.lan/
    JITSI_SUB: meet.darkstar.lan
volumes:
    - /usr/share/docker/data/jitsi-keycloak/config:/config
ports:
    - "3000:3000"
networks:
    keycloak0.lan:
    ipv4_address: 172.20.0.6
aliases:
    - jitsi-keycloak.keycloak0.lan

networks:
    keycloak0.lan
    external: true
# --- end ---

The string value for the JITSI_SECRET variable needs to be the same string we used in the definition of the Jitsi container earlier, where the variable is called JWT_APP_SECRET.

Hint: in Bash you can create a random 32 character string like this:

$ cat /dev/urandom | tr -dc 'a-zA-Z0-9' | fold -w 32 | head -n 1
BySOoKBDIC1NWfeYpktvexJIqOAcAMEt

If you have nodejs installed, generate a random ‘secret’ string using this ‘node’ command:

$ node -e "console.log(require('crypto').randomBytes(24).toString('base64'));"
NmjPGpn+NjTe7oQUV9YqfaXiBULcsxYj

Configuration of jitsi-keycloak in the Keycloak Admin console

Point your browser to the Keycloak Admin console https://sso.darkstar.lan/auth/admin/ to start the configuration process.

Add a public openid-connect client in the ‘foundation‘ Keycloak realm (the realm where you created your users in the previous Episode of this article series):

  • Select ‘foundation‘ realm; click on ‘Clients‘ and then click ‘Create‘ button.
    • Client ID‘ = “jitsi
    • Client Protocol‘ = “openid-connect” (the default)
    • Save.
  • Also in ‘Settings‘, allow this app from Keycloak.
    Our Jitsi-keycloak container is running on https://sso.meet.darkstar.lan . Therefore we add

    • Valid Redirect URIs‘ = https://sso.meet.darkstar.lan/*
    • Web Origins‘ = https://sso.meet.darkstar.lan
    • Save.
  • Go to ‘Installation‘ tab to download the ‘keycloak.json‘ file for this new client:
    • Format Option‘ = “Keycloak OIDC JSON”
    • Click ‘Download‘ which downloads a file “keycloak.json” with the following content:
# ---
{
    "realm": "foundation",
    "auth-server-url": "https://sso.darkstar.lan/auth",
    "ssl-required": "external",
    "resource": "jitsi",
    "public-client": true,
    "confidential-port": 0
}
# ---

Remaining configuration done in jitsi-keycloak

Back at your server’s shell prompt again, do as follows:

Copy the downloaded “keycloak.json” file into the ‘/config‘ directory of jitsi-keycloak (the container’s /config is exposed in the host filesystem as /usr/share/docker/data/jitsi-keycloak/config).

# cp ~/Download/keycloak.json /usr/share/docker/data/jitsi-keycloak/config/

Start the jitsi-keycloak container in the directory where we have our tailored ‘docker-compose.yml‘ file:

# cd /usr/share/docker/data/jitsi-keycloak
# docker-compose up -d

Once the container is running, we make jitsi-keycloak available at https://sso.meet.darkstar.lan/ using a reverse-proxy setup (jitsi-keycloak will not work in a sub-folder).
Add these reverse proxy lines to your VirtualHost definition of the “sso.meet.darkstar.lan” web site configuration and restart httpd:

# ---
# Reverse proxy to jitsi-keycloak Docker container:
SSLProxyEngine On
SSLProxyCheckPeerCN on
SSLProxyCheckPeerExpire on
RequestHeader set X-Forwarded-Proto: "https"
RequestHeader set X-Forwarded-Port: "443"

<Location />
    AllowOverride None
    Require all granted
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Location>

ProxyPreserveHost On
ProxyRequests Off
ProxyVia on
ProxyAddHeaders On
AllowEncodedSlashes NoDecode

# Jitsi-keycloak:
ProxyPass / http://127.0.0.1:3000/
ProxyPassReverse / http://127.0.0.1:3000/
# ---

Configure docker-jitsi-meet for use of jitsi-keycloak

Actually, you have already done all the correct changes which are needed in the ‘.env‘ file for Docker Compose!
The  docker-jitsi-meet configurations that are relevant for jitsi-keycloak are as follows:

ENABLE_AUTH=1
AUTH_TYPE=jwt
JWT_APP_ID=jitsi
JWT_APP_SECRET=NmjPGpn+NjTe7oQUV9YqfaXiBULcsxYj
# To enable an automatic redirect from Jitsi to the Keycloak login page:
TOKEN_AUTH_URL=https://sso.meet.darkstar.lan/{room}

The values for ‘JWT_APP_SECRET‘ and ‘JITSI_SECRET‘ must be identical, and the value of ‘JWT_APP_ID‘ must be equal to “jitsi“.

Firing up the bbq

With all the prep work completed and the containers are running, we can enjoy the new online video conferencing platform we now operate for friends and family.

So, how does this actually look in practice? I’ll share a couple of screenshots from a Jitsi Meet session that I setup. Look at how cool it looks (and not just because of the screenshot of my den and the Slackware hoodie I am wearing…)

The Jitsi Meet welcome screen:

Device settings:

Joining a meeting:

Logging in via Keycloak SSO, you’ll notice that I have configured 2-Factor Authentication for my account:

After having logged in, I am back at the “join meeting screen” but now with my name written as Keycloak knows it (“Eric Hameleers” instead of “Alien BOB“) and I need to click one more time on the “Join” button.
Then I am participating in the meeting as the moderator.
You’ve probably noticed that I flipped my camera view here. I also added one ‘break-out room‘ to allow for separate discussions to take place outside of the main room:

 

 

And if you are not the moderator but a guest who received the link to this meeting, this is what you’ll see at first:

 

Cool, eh?

Thanks

… again for taking the time to read through another lengthy article. Share your feedback in the comments section below, if you actually implemented Jitsi Meet on your own server.


Attribution

The Docker-Jitsi-Meet architecture image was taken from Jitsi’s github site.

27 Comments

  1. Karl

    Hi Eric,

    I am plannig to follow your artickle series and build my own. I have a linode server with ubuntu, and I set up openfire on it (in addition to nextcloud). I am sure you considered openfire during you search for video conferencing software. What makde you drop it from consideration?

    Karl

    • alienbob

      There’s only so much you can do, and I am interested in Nextcloud, not in Openfire. By the way, Openfire still uses Jitsi for video conferencing.
      Jitsi Meet was the video conferencing platform I needed and when integrated into Nextcloud (topic of the upcoming Episode 4) you have everything you need at hand in your NextCloud: groupchat, bridges to other chat networks, audio/video meetings, document collaboration, kanban boards, private/public/group calendaring etc.

      There’s nothing against Openfire or any other collaboration platform. It’s all a matter of preference and choice.

  2. Jeronimo Barros

    Thanks Eric ! As always your posts are very interesting and highly technically detailed both on usefulness and clarity.

    • alienbob

      I hope some people are actually going to implement this or at least get some useful new knowledge of the articles.

  3. Konrad J Hambrick

    Eric —
    This is an awesome series !
    Thank you for taking the time to create the docs !
    — kjh

    • alienbob

      Well, two more are already written and the third only needs testing the truth of what I wrote. But I am waiting until after the Slackware 15.0 release to publish more. The Slackware release should shine!

  4. alienbob

    Today the Slackware team had a release party using my self-hosted Docker instance of Jitsi Meet, and when the ISOs and distro trees for Slackware 15.0 went public we saw a steady increase in bandwidth being consumed by the downloads – on the same server we were using for the meeting.
    And even when 90% of available bandwidth was used by downloads, the seven people in the meeting experienced *no* degradation in audio or video quality.
    This Jitsi platform is really powerful.

  5. hecman

    reminds me of the time i setup zimbra on slackware…

    I have tried doing Rocket.Chat on devuan, that was not so successful either.

    Having avoided “docker” all this time….i’ll feel dirty following this guide, but I have always wanted private video chat.

  6. tasoss

    Great work.
    Thanks again.

  7. lightkuragari

    Hi Eric,

    These guides are incredibly helpful. I’ve had a Nextcloud instance serving my cloud based file management for a few years now but it’s interesting to see others do their own setup and learn from that. I’m currently following your guide for Jitsi integration, and I’m mostly done, but when starting a meeting room and clicking I’m the host, it redirects me to the sso.meet subdomain and then I get this error (the sso.meet subdomain is already configured and got a certificate for it installed):
    Error code: SSL_ERROR_NO_CYPHER_OVERLAP
    Also, I had to make some changes to the docker-compose.yml because I was getting errors from it, and this is how it ended:
    #########################
    version: ‘3’

    services:
    jitsi-keycloak:
    image: d3473r/jitsi-keycloak
    container_name: jitsi-keycloak
    hostname: jitsi-keycloak
    restart: always
    environment:
    JITSI_SECRET: xxxxxxxxxxxx
    DEFAULT_ROOM: meeting
    JITSI_URL: https://meet.home.arpa/
    JITSI_SUB: meet.home.arpa
    volumes:
    – /usr/share/docker/data/jitsi-keycloak/config:/config
    ports:
    – “3000:3000”
    networks:
    keycloak0.lan:
    ipv4_address: 172.19.0.6
    aliases:
    – jitsi-keycloak.keycloak0.lan

    networks:
    keycloak0.lan:
    external: true
    ############################

    Do you know what could be causing the SSL error there?
    Thank you for these articles!

  8. lightkuragari

    Hi Eric,

    (Thanks for listening to my request earlier, btw)
    Again though, thank you for this series of articles, and as I said before, I’m learning a good deal from this, and I’ve been adapting some things into my own cloud setup.
    I’m trying to implement the Jitsi integration, and I’ve done everything mentioned here, however when going into a meeting and clicking on the “I’m the host” button, I get redirected to the sso.meet subdomain that corresponds to the jitsi-keycloak container and reverse proxy properly, but I get this error:

    Error code: SSL_ERROR_NO_CYPHER_OVERLAP

    Do you have any idea of why this could be happening?

    I have a proper ssl certificate set-up and all my other reverse proxied services work fine. Also, the formatting of the docker-compose.yml for jitsi-keycloak seems like it was a bit off in the blog post since I was getting errors and had to fix it a bit.
    I plan to continue implementing the rest of what you’ve published so far, so I’ll let you know how it goes.

    Cheers!

    • lightkuragari

      Actually, it must have been the formatting of the example configuration I got from github

    • lightkuragari

      Fixed it by using a first level subdomain name instead of a second level subdomain. It seems the certificate had issues with second level subdomains

      • alienbob

        Glad you could find a solution. I use Let’s Encrypt certificates myself and did not have issues with the 2nd level subdomain (I built mostly the same infrastructure as described in these articles for my real-life servers).

        • lightkuragari

          Oh, interesting. I’m also using Let’s Enctypt, with dehydrated. I wonder if this is an issue with dehydrated then. I’m using a dns-01 challenge for this and it seemed to have no issues while renewing. But I got that error when trying to log in. I might try again in the future.

        • alienbob

          The error “Error code: SSL_ERROR_NO_CYPHER_OVERLAP” is something you might be able to fix on the Apache HTTPD side. The httpd configuration contains the support encryption cyphers, and if your browser supports only different cyphers than your webserver is configured for, you get this error.
          This is what my server has:
          LoadModule ssl_module lib64/httpd/modules/mod_ssl.so
          Listen 443
          SSLCipherSuite HIGH:MEDIUM:!MD5:!RC4:!3DES
          SSLProxyCipherSuite HIGH:MEDIUM:!MD5:!RC4:!3DES
          SSLHonorCipherOrder on
          SSLCompression off
          SSLOptions +StrictRequire
          SSLProtocol all -SSLv3 -SSLv2
          SSLProxyProtocol all -SSLv3 -SSLv2
          SSLPassPhraseDialog builtin
          SSLSessionCache "shmcb:/var/run/ssl_scache(512000)"
          SSLSessionCacheTimeout 300
          #Header edit Set-Cookie (?i)^(.*)(;\s*secure)??((\s*;)?(.*)) "$1; Secure$3$4"

        • lightkuragari

          Thank you so much for sharing your configuration!
          I gave this another try, and found out the real reason behind this problem: Cloudflare’s SSL Browser to Cloudflare certificate.
          I use Cloudflare’s proxy and certificates for my domains, and they only support second level domain certificates under their paid plans.
          If I add my hosts to /etc/hosts the Let’s Encrypt certificates are loaded instead and those work fine, but I think I’ll continue using Cloudflare’s certificates in addition to the Let’s Encrypt ones. I like the added barrier and as long as there’s a workaround, it works for me.

          Thank you for your help!

  9. Clay

    I am continuing my progress in this series and I have learned a lot, in no small part to folks who have helped me here an in Libera.Chat. Jitsi Meet is at version 8138 at the time of my installation. I have run into two roadblocks. First, when I go to meet.folklandmanagement.com, I get
    “Proxy Error
    The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server.
    The proxy server could not handle the request
    Reason: Error reading from remote server”

    in the browser.

    That message makes me think something is answering. If I stop Apache, I get the expected result of a web server not running: a different message. “docker ps” gives:

    0f2b61e9b010 jitsi/jvb:stable-8138-1 “/init” 31 minutes ago Up 31 minutes 127.0.0.1:8080->8080/tcp, 0.0.0.0:10000->10000/udp, :::10000->10000/udp docker-jitsi-meet-stable-8138-1-jvb-1
    41318ad13095 jitsi/jicofo:stable-8138-1 “/init” 31 minutes ago Up 31 minutes docker-jitsi-meet-stable-8138-1-jicofo-1
    41b8dd7eb43c jitsi/prosody:stable-8138-1 “/init” 31 minutes ago Up 31 minutes 5222/tcp, 5280/tcp, 5347/tcp docker-jitsi-meet-stable-8138-1-prosody-1
    38070101a3b5 jitsi/web:stable-8138-1 “/init” 31 minutes ago Up 31 minutes 0.0.0.0:8440->80/tcp, :::8440->80/tcp, 0.0.0.0:8443->443/tcp, :::8443->443/tcp docker-jitsi-meet-stable-8138-1-web-1
    The second one down does not have any published ports, is this correct? In docker logs for “web:stable” there are a lot of

    “nginx: [emerg] host not found in upstream “etherpad.meet.jitsi” in /config/nginx/meet.conf:104″

    in there. Browsing through the file tree of “docker-jitsi-meet-stable-8138-1/” I can’t find such a directory. I did find a meet.conf, but line 104 is commented out and pursuant to XMPP websockets. This server is not directly connected to the internet and the hosts file has been edited to point any domain name to the local IP address. This seems to have worked for everything so far, including https://gerardozamudio.mx/2021/01/01/slackware-15-current-mail-server-with-mariadb-postfix-and-dovecot/
    Is the log message above actually an issue? Other than docker logs, don’t know where to look. I have looked at dmesg, and /var/log/messages.

    Second, when running “docker-compose up -d” for jitsi-keycloak, I get “services.image must be a mapping” and “services.container_name must be a mapping” on other attempts to start. When looking at the docker-compose.yml, I see hostname: and container name lack a “t” in jitsi. Adding one does not help. Could this failure be a result of the above problem? Should the “t” be there? I have to assume it does.

    I have started on the next in the series and have some problems there, but I’ll save that until this is sorted out.

    Thanks in advance and thank you again to Eric for putting all of this together.

    • alienbob

      The ‘web’ container is the one that is exposed through the Apache reverse proxy. Your “docker ps” shows that it is mapping its internal port 80 to 8440 which is what you should be using in the Apache reverse proxy configuration, as shown in the article above. But the response you get is an indication that Apache does not find a server listening at that port 8440.
      Can you share your full docker-compose.yml file somewhere on a pastebin server? Also the VirtualHost definition that you are using to run meet.folklandmanagement.com ?

  10. Clay

    Eric,
    Thank you for your reply. I have put both the docker-compose.yam and the Virtualhost section at the below link. This is the first time I have looked at the docker-compose and I see it has ports 80 and 443 at the top. I change 443 to 8440 but that didn’t change the result. From what I understand, the reverse proxy is set up correctly, I looked at error_log in /var/log/http/ and saw nothing I thought correlated to the problem. I do have “ServerName meet.folklandmanagement.com:443” in the VirtualHost. Currently, I have the SSL certs and key pointed to the DigiCert one, but will set it up to use Let’s Encrypt once it has direct access to the internet. I started your guide but hit a wall since the machine is behind a firewall and the .well_known directories are not accessible from the internet. I assume the certs are not part of the problem, the error_log does complain the cert does not match the sever name, but the SSO/keycloak proxy works fine and that is one of the subdomains it complains about.

    https://pastebin.com/aJAD931q

    Thanks again for your help.

    • alienbob

      I am still running an older version of Jitsi Meet for Docker (stable-6826) so perhaps some changes were introduced that you are being affected by and I have no clue about.

      To reply to your post:
      It’s not the docker-compose.yml where you need to make these edits. Instead, my article tells you to rename “.env.example” to “.env” and make your edits there. The port “8000” is defined in “.env” as the HTTP_PORT (note: http and not https) and this needs to be changed to something else; my article uses the alternate port 8440. But your logs show that you already configured this, perhaps you forgot that you did this after all the failed troubleshooting.
      I was more curious how you are using the host meet.folklandmanagement.com if you are running your Docker containers behind a firewall. To me, meet.folklandmanagement.com is just timing out and I guess your troubles are also related to the fact that you are not setting this up on an internet-connected host.

      Your Apache config looks OK, but note that it contains a section to support an EtherPad server. Your docker-compose.yml will not start an EtherPad container however. This does not create an issue, so don’t worry about EtherPad yes/no until after you have Jitsi Meet up and running.

  11. Clay

    Eric,
    Thank you for your reply and help. Other than the temporary change to the port, I have not edited the docker-compose.yml. I did as your instructions had and edited the copied-from .example.env to .env file; which is why I had not looked at the docker-compose.yml until the past into pastbin. The port 8440 was configured to begin with as I was scrupulously following your instructions. I can continue the set up once the server is installed and has a real IP address and I was wondering if this was a problem. I was a little surprised I have gotten this far without an internet addressable IP address. The e-mail is set up and configured as well as NextCloud (sso not set up, have run into issues): those are the two big ones I do need right off. As for EtherPad, my thinking is as you have stated here, I was going to worry about getting it working after I made it through the Jitsi Meet portion; I don’t know it is not working but that bridge is down the road a bit. Other than error_log for Apache, is there another log I can look at to verify this time-out issue?

    • alienbob

      The best I can come up with if you are still behind a firewall and the Jitsi server is not connected to the internet, is to (temporarily) stop using “meet.folklandmanagement.com” as the URL for your Jitsi server. Instead, use a hostname that works on your LAN (I assume you have a working DNS server in your LAN, otherwise you really need to set one up ASAP).
      I expect that the timeouts will go away once you use hostnames that work in your LAN. The Jitsi server will not work with any other hostname than the one you configured for PUBLIC_URL in the Docker Compose environment file.

  12. Clay

    Eric,
    Thanks again. I went into the router (provided by ISP) and set a static IP address for the server and added DNS entries for all of the subdomains. It works as expected but get the Error code: SSL_ERROR_BAD_CERT_DOMAIN since the certificate is only valid for http://www.folklandmanagement.com and folklandmanagement.com. Jitsi still gets the proxy error but could it be because of the certificate not matching the URL? I think my next step is to get the certificates correct for each domain. That has to get done anyway. I have gotten a cert from CACert with three SANs (meet, sso, mail). I am updating the vhost for Jitsi and will see how it likes that cert. I will get Let’s Encrypt certificates configured for the long term but it is giving me issues getting them since it is behind a firewall. Will report back if that fails I will start searching for some breakages or changes between version 8138 and 6828 of Jitsi Meet.

    • alienbob

      If the proxy keeps failing, you can try connecting to the docker container itself.
      From another computer in the LAN, connect to http://ip.of.the.host:8440/ . Or else on the host server itself, connect to http://localhost:8440/ and see who answers. You can use a graphical browser but also console tools like lynx, links, curl.

  13. 2dots

    When will new articles appear? And then a month has passed. Want something new.

    • alienbob

      Not exactly the tone that I appreciate when someone wants me to do something for them.

Leave a Reply to Clay Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

© 2024 Alien Pastures

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑