How to install Jitsi meet on CentOS 8

With the pandemic, the need of video conferencing applications raised. There are lots of solutions out there like Zoom, Teams and Google Meets, but what if you want to host a video conferencing application on your server? Jitsi Meet is one of the popular video conferencing tool out there in the market. It is completely free and also open source. So lets get into how to install Jitsi meet on CentOS 8

Prerequisites

VPS with CentOS 8 Installed
Root access to the VPS
A SSH client

Steps

1. Log into VPS

Windows

Open PuTTY
Enter your server IP in “Host Name” field
Click on Open

Mac or Linux

Open Terminal
After that Run this command in your terminal (Replace YOUR_SEVER_IP)

ssh root@YOUR_SEVER_IP

Type your password when it is asked

It is a good practise to update the server when setting something on a fresh VPS.

dnf update -y

2. Install Docker and Docker Composer

sudo yum install -y yum-utils
sudo yum-config-manager \
    --add-repo \
    https://download.docker.com/linux/centos/docker-ce.repo

sudo yum install docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io

sudo systemctl start docker
systemctl enable docker

Then install Docker compose,

sudo curl -L "https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/download/1.28.6/docker-compose-$(uname -s)-$(uname -m)" -o /usr/local/bin/docker-compose

sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-compose

Verify whether installation has gone through successfully by running this command,

docker-compose --version

If this gives a output something like “docker-compose version 1.28.6, build 1110ad01”, the docker compose installation is successful.

3. Install Jitsi Meet

Unfortunately Jitsi meet does not have a package for CentOS 8. That’s why we installed Docker Compose. There is a docker image for Jitsi meet on the GitHub.

First, download the image and move to the folder.

git clone https://github.com/jitsi/docker-jitsi-meet
cd docker-jitsi-meet
cp env.example .env

Then we need to create required directories for Jitsi Meet.

mkdir -p ~/.jitsi-meet-cfg/{web/letsencrypt,transcripts,prosody,jicofo,jvb}

And then build the Jitsi Meet on Docker image through Docker Compose

docker-compose up -d

And last, check whether the Docker container is running.

docker ps

4. Setup Firewall Rules

firewall-cmd --zone=public --add-port=80/tcp --permanent
firewall-cmd --zone=public --add-port=443/tcp --permanent
firewall-cmd --zone=public --add-port=8443/tcp --permanent
firewall-cmd --zone=public --add-port=4443/tcp --permanent
firewall-cmd --zone=public --add-port=10000/udp --permanent
firewall-cmd --reload

Now we have made the Jitsi meet installation on CentOS 8.

So how to use Jitsi Meet and where is it? Open up your browser and go to https://YOUR_SEVER_IP:8443/

You may also like to read How to setup your own VPN server 2021