RogerBW's Blog: Self-Hosting Jitsi

Jitsi Meet is a free video-conferencing package of which I have been hosting an instance since 2020. Here's how I have it set up.

I use the Debian packages. You can do it via Docker instead.

deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/jitsi-keyring.gpg] https://download.jitsi.org stable/

I'm already running Apache on that machine, and have it set up as a virtual host (PUBLICNAME replaces the public DNS name in the configuration below). mod_ssl and mod_proxy are needed. I'm using Let's Encrypt SSL certificates, which get renewed via the standard mechanisms that everything else uses.

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName PUBLICNAME
    Redirect permanent / https://PUBLICNAME/
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *:443>
    ServerName PUBLICNAME

    # enable HTTP/2, if available
    Protocols h2 http/1.1

    SSLEngine on
    SSLProxyEngine on
    SSLCertificateFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/PUBLICNAME/fullchain.pem
    SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/PUBLICNAME/privkey.pem

    Header always set Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=63072000"

    DocumentRoot "/usr/share/jitsi-meet"
    <Directory "/usr/share/jitsi-meet">
        Options Indexes MultiViews Includes FollowSymLinks
        AddOutputFilter Includes html
        AllowOverride All
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
    </Directory>

    ErrorDocument 404 /static/404.html

    Alias "/config.js" "/etc/jitsi/meet/PUBLICNAME-config.js"
    <Location /config.js>
        Require all granted
    </Location>

    Alias "/external_api.js" "/usr/share/jitsi-meet/libs/external_api.min.js"
    <Location /external_api.js>
        Require all granted
    </Location>

    ProxyPreserveHost on
    ProxyPass /http-bind http://localhost:5280/http-bind
    ProxyPassReverse /http-bind http://localhost:5280/http-bind
    ProxyPass /xmpp-websocket ws://localhost:5280/xmpp-websocket
    ProxyPassReverse /xmpp-websocket ws://localhost:5280/xmpp-websocket
    ProxyPass /colibri-ws/default-id ws://localhost:9090/colibri-ws/default-id
    ProxyPassReverse /colibri-ws/default-id ws://localhost:9090/colibri-ws/default-id

    RewriteEngine on
    RewriteRule ^/([a-zA-Z0-9]+)$ /index.html
</VirtualHost>

There's no authentication required: I just pass out a suitable long meeting URL beforehand, and I haven't had any trouble with outsiders jumping into conversations. (Obviously I could apply basic auth in the standard ways.)

The only problem I have found, which doesn't seem to be a standard error, is that sometimes when the second person connects to a meeting both will get an error message (this is the point at which the video bridge should be fired up automatially). Restarting the background daemons gets the job done.

RogerBW's Blog

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