Self-hosting Jitsi video conferencing

Jit.si is a terrific, secure video-conferencing #alternative to #Zoom and obviously comes with all the open-source awesomeness. Call clarity is amazing and with a room capacity of 100+ (and potentially much more, driven by network and server capabilities), it’s an absolute no-brainer to switch over. Use Jitsi Meet on the desktop or use one of their slick android, F-droid or iPhone apps on hand-held devices to organise your video conferences.

With the recent push to video-conferencing most meetings, I decided to setup my own instance. This was way more straightforward than I thought! I am currenty running it as a docker container, fronted with #Traefik for encryption. Configuration and installation steps mentioned below assume you have access to a domain name and server with docker already installed.

Setting up the server:

A records:

Create a new A record with your hosting provider to point your subdomain to the IP address of your server

SSH into server and install:

It should cost you only about 5$ per month for a decent server configuration. I already had an account with Hetzner, so I deployed my instance there.

SSH into your server: sudo ssh user@xx.xx.xx.xx

Initialise a swarm: sudo docker swarm init

Create the traefik network: sudo docker network create --driver=overlay traefik-net

Create two new yml files – one for traefik-ssl and another for jitsi, copy over the contents from the respective files available here from ethibox and make edits as needed:

sudo nano traefik-ssl.yml

sudo nano jitsi.yml

Deploy the Traefik stack: sudo docker stack deploy -c traefik-ssl.yml traefik

Deploy the Jitsi stack: DOMAIN=meet.srkn.org SCHEME=https docker stack deploy -c jitsi.yml jitsi

If all goes well, you should now have a Jitsi instance running on your server with routing and ssl taken care of by Traefik.

Configuring Jitsi:

You now need to setup the admin account. Login to the Jitsi prosody container. (Update command to reflect your container name):

docker exec -it jitsi_prosody_1.xxxxxx bash

Set as many host credentials as you need:

prosodyctl --config /config/prosody.cfg.lua register host meet.jitsi usejitsi

Exit out of the console! You now have a fully functional self-hosted Video-conference running! Do note that the recording feature currently does not work outright. Will have to sort that out over the next few days.

Desktop and Mobile clients:

I decided to go the electron route for the desktop client. Jitsi has apps for both android and iOS that work out of the box. Just make sure you set the domains to yours.