Installing Jitsi Meet on Debian Stretch

Jitsi Meet Overview

Jitsi Meet is a free and fully encrypted open source video conferencing service solution providing high quality and audio without subscription or the need to create an account.

The tool provides features like:

• Sharing of desktops, presentations, and more
• Inviting users to a conference via a simple, custom URL
• Editing documents together using Etherpad
• Trading messages and emojis while video conferencing, with integrated chat.

Requirements

• You have an account and are logged into console.scaleway.com
• You have configured your SSH Key
• You have a Scaleway Compute Instance running Debian Stretch (9.0)
• For best performances of Jitsi Meet, an instance with at least 4GB RAM is recommended
• You have a domain or subdomain pointed to your Compute Instance

Installing Jitsi Meet

1 . Configure a the hostname of the server corresponding to your domain / subdomain name:

hostnamectl set-hostname jitsi
sed -i 's/^127.0.1.1.*$/127.0.1.1 jitsi.mydomain.tld jitsi/g' /etc/hosts

2 . Start by updating the software already installed on the system:

apt update && apt upgrade -y

3 . Install Java 8 on the server:

apt install -y openjdk-8-jre-headless

4 . Setup the JAVA_HOME environment variable:

echo "JAVA_HOME=$(readlink -f /usr/bin/java | sed "s:bin/java::")" | tee -a /etc/profile
source /etc/profile

5 . Install a Nginx web server before installing Jitsi Meet. The Jitsi installation tool will take care about the configuration of Nginx, if it is present on the system. Run the following commands to install and enable Nginx:

apt install -y nginx
systemctl start nginx.service
systemctl enable nginx.service

Important: If Nginx or Apache is not present on the system, Jitsi Meet will automatically install Jetty during the installation.

6 . Download the APT key and setup the repositories of Jitsi, to install the software via apt:

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

7 . Launch the installation of Jitsi Meet:

apt install -y jitsi-meet

When asked, enter:

• The FQDN of your instance. For example jitsi.mydomain.tld and press Enter.
• When asked about the SSL certificate choose the Generate a new self-signed certificate (You will later get a chance to obtain a Let's Encrypt certificate) option and press Enter.

8 . Run the following script to generate a Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate for your instance:

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

When asked, enter:

• Your e-mail address to receive notifications regarding your certificate and press enter to request the certificate.

9 . The Jitsi Meet instance is configured now and ready for a first conference call. Open a Web-browser and type the FQDN of your instance, for example: https://jitsi.mydomain.tld. The following screen will appear:

• Enter a name for your conference and press Go to enter the conference room. It is now possible to share the link, to set a password, configure the audio and video quality and more for the conference.

10 . Happy conferencing :)