Jitsi Video Chat

Jitsi

Jitsi is a set of open-source projects that allows you to easily build and deploy secure video conferencing solutions.

Is really easy to install, and also a really good private, federated and libre alternative to Zoom or other video conferencing software. You can create calls just by typing the URL, and loging-in is not necessary.

Dependencies and Installation

First, install some dependencies:

apt install gpg apt-transport-https nginx python3-certbot-nginx

Jitsi has its own package repository, so let's add it.

curl https://download.jitsi.org/jitsi-key.gpg.key | gpg --dearmor > /usr/share/keyrings/jitsi-keyring.gpg
echo 'deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/jitsi-keyring.gpg] https://download.jitsi.org stable/' > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/jitsi-stable.list
apt update -y

Ok. So now we can install Jitsi, but before we do that, let's setup the firewall ufw, in case you have it enabled, and the SSL certificate.

Enable Required Ports

If you are using ufw or another firewall, there are several ports we need to ensure are open:

ufw allow 80/tcp
ufw allow 443/tcp
ufw allow 10000/udp
ufw allow 3478/udp
ufw allow 5349/tcp
ufw enable

For your information, these allow the following:

SSL certificate

I'll be using certbot and Nginx to generate a certificate for the Jitsi subdomain to allow encrypted connections. 

certbot --nginx certonly -d meet.example.org

We will not create an Nginx config file for Jitsi because the Jitsi package we will be installing will do that automatically.

Installation

To begin the installation process, just run:

apt install jitsi-meet

It will ask you for your hostname; there you'll need to input the subdomain you have just added to Nginx, like meet.example.org.

For the SSL certificate, choose I want to use my own certificate.

When it ask you for the certification key and cert files, input /etc/letsencrypt/live/meet.example.org/privkey.pem and /etc/letsencrypt/live/meet.example.org/fullchain.pem respectively.

Using Jitsi

Jitsi once installed

Jitsi can be used in a browser by then just going to meet.example.org.

Note that there are also Jitsi clients for all major platforms:

When using a Jitsi app for the first time, remember to go to the "Settings" menu and change your server name to the Jitsi site you just created.

When you create a video chatroom, its address will appear as meet.example.org/yourvideochatname and can be shared as such.

More info

This article is based on the original documentation. There you can find more details and configurations.