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BoardroomWebRTC

Boardroom WebRTC - using tokbox version 2

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Boardroom WebRTC - MultiParty Video Conference

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Boardroom is your private web-based video conferencing solution. It is based on the TokBox OpenTok platform and uses the OpenTok SDKs and API. You can deploy Boardroom on your servers to get your own Google Hangouts alternative running on WebRTC.

This repository contains a Node.js server and a web client application.

Table of Contents

Installation

If you want to install Boardroom on your own server, read on. If you want to deploy OpenTokRTC to Heroku, see INSTALL-heroku.md.

Requirements

You will need these dependencies installed on your machine:

You will also need these API subscriptions:

Setting up

Once all the dependencies are in place, you will need to set some configuration options and install the applications dependencies.

First, change directory to where you have downloaded OpenTokRTC. Then create create the file config.json in the config folder. You can copy config/example.json to config/config.json

$ cd <path-to-OpenTokRTC>
$ cp config/example.json config/config.json

Edit configuration file

Edit config/config.json and replace <key> and <secret> with your OpenTok API key and the corresponding API secret:

{
    "OpenTok": {
        "apiKey": "<key>"
        "apiSecret": "<secret>"
    }
}

If you want to use archive management, set up Firebase configuration. To do these, edit the configuration sections for "Firebase" and "Archiving". Replace <firebase_url> with a Firebase database URL and <firebase_secret> with a corresponding database secret. Also mark Archiving and archivingManager as enabled. For more information on how to obtain Firebase credentials, see Firebase configuration section below:

{
    "Firebase": {
        "dataUrl": "<firebase_url>",
        "authSecret": "<firebase_secret>"
    },
    "Archiving": {
        "enabled": true,
        "archiveManager": {
            "enabled": true
        }
    }
}

For more configuration options, see detailed configuration options below:

Next, set up the dependencies for the server:

$ npm install

Note: You will need to run these commands as a non-root user, else bower will refuse to execute.

Running

Ensure that Redis server is running on localhost (run redis-server). Start the application in foreground by running:

$ node server

This will start the application on port 8123 by default.

To specify a custom port number, use the -p flag when calling node server, e.g., to run the application on port 8080:

$ node server -p 8080

Additionally, you can start the application as a daemon by passing -d flag, which starts the application and keeps it running in the background so that your terminal is not blocked, e.g.:

$ node server -d

To start the server with HTTPS enabled, pass -S flag to launch a secure server along with -C <dir> flag to specify a directory that holds SSL certificate files. To quickly start a secure server, run:

$ node server -S -C sampleCerts

The server expects SSL certificate file to be named serverCert.pem and SSL private key file to be named serverKey.pem. There is a pre-generated, self-signed SSL certificate pair in the ./sampleCerts directory.

For detailed information on available options, run $ node server -h.

Configuration options

Configuration can be done using the config JSON file, or environment variables which overwrite any JSON value read. The default JSON file is config/config.json. This path can be overwritten using the Environment Variable DEFAULT_JSON_CONFIG_PATH. These are the detailed configuration options:

OpenTok configuration

Environment Variable Names and Description:

JSON example:

"OpenTok": {
	"apiKey": "<key>",
	"apiSecret": "<secret>",
	"maxSessionAge": 2,
}

Firebase configuration

This application needs you to specify a Firebase database URL and a database secret. Here is how you can obtain both.

Go to Firebase console, create a new project or choose an existing project. Once there, follow these steps:

Then set the following values in config/config.json, replacing <firebase_url> with the Firebase database URL and <firebase_secret> with the Firebase database secret:

"Firebase": {
    "dataUrl": "<firebase_url>",
    "authSecret": "<firebase_secret>"
}

You can also set the values using these environment variables:

Firebase security measure

If you want to ensure that the archive list is kept secure (as in only the actual people using a room can see it, and nobody can see the list of archives of other rooms) then you will need to configure additional security parameters to your Firebase application. To do this, log in to Firebase console, go to your project, then in Database > Rules set these rules and hit Publish:

{
    "rules": {
        ".read": "auth != null && auth.role == 'server'",
        ".write": "auth != null && auth.role == 'server'",
        "$sessionId": {
            ".read": "auth != null && (auth.role == 'server' || auth.sessionId == $sessionId)",
            ".write": "auth != null && auth.role == 'server'",
            "archives": {},
            "connections": {
                ".read": "auth != null && auth.role == 'server'",
                ".write": "auth != null && (auth.role == 'server' || auth.sessionId == $sessionId)",
                "$connectionId": {}
            }
        }
    }
}

Screen sharing

The screen-sharing-extension-chrome directory includes sample files for developing a Chrome extension for enabling screen-sharing for this app. See the OpenTok screen sharing developer guide for more information.

Follow these steps to use the chrome extension included in this repository.

  1. Edit the manifest.json file:

    • Set the matches property to match only your web domains. (When developing in the localhost environment, you can use "matches": ["http://localhost/*"]).

    • Change the name and author settings

    • Replace the icon files (logo16.png, logo48.png, logo128.png, and logo128transparent.png) with your own website logos.

    • Change the version setting with each new version of your extension.

    • You may want to change the description.

    For more information, see the Chrome extension manifest documentation.

  2. Load the extension into Chrome:

    Open chrome://extensions and drag the screen-sharing-extension-chrome directory onto the page, or click ‘Load unpacked extension…’. For more information see Chrome’s documentation on loading unpacked extensions.

  3. Add the extensionId to application configuration:

    You can get the ID of the extension in the chrome://extensions page. (It looks like ffngmcfincpecmcgfdpacbdbdlfeeokh). Add the value to the configuration, see Configuration Options: Screen sharing.

For more information and how to use your extension in production see the documentation at the opentok/screensharing-extensions repo on GitHub.

Web client configuration

Web client allows to be configured in some of its features. You can enable or disable using their enabled field in JSON or ENABLE_<FEATURE> environment variable.

Archiving

Archive Manager
"Archiving": {
    "enabled": true,
    "archiveAlways": false,
    "pollingInitialTimeout": 5000,
    "pollingTimeoutMultiplier": 1.5,
    "archiveManager": {
        "enabled": false,
        "emptyRoomMaxLifetime": 3
    }
},

Screen sharing configuration

"Screensharing": {
    "enabled": false,
    "chromeExtensionId": null,
    "annotations": {
        "enabled": true
    }
}

To know more about how screen sharing works in OpenTok, see the guide on screen sharing.

Feedback

ENABLE_FEEDBACK: Enable the “Give Demo Feedback” form.

 "Feedback": {
     "enabled": false
 },

Additional configuration options

Customizing UI

For information on how to customize OpenTokRTC’s UI, see CUSTOMIZING-UI.md.

Troubleshooting

“ServerPersistence: Timeout while connecting to the Persistence Provider! Is Redis running?

Ensure Redis server is running on localhost (run redis-server in the command line) and restart OpenTokRTC.

OpenTokRTC does not work on when served over HTTP.

Browser security policies require HTTPS for WebRTC video communications. You will need to set up the app to be served over HTTPS. You can set up a secure reverse-proxy to your OpenTokRTC port using nginx. For details, read this post.

UI looks broken

UI assets are compiled as part of the build process when installing application dependencies using npm install. If the web application UI still looks broken, run the following commands in the root directory of the application:

$ bower install
$ grunt clientBuild

We recommend that you run the application as a non-root user. Howerver, if you are running the application as the root user, you will additionally need to tell bower to allow root user to install dependencies, else bower will refuse to work:

$ bower install --allow-root