BigBlueButton Broadcaster

Containerized setup to stream and record a BigBlueButton meeting to the web. This includes recording, converting, a web server with valid TLS and monitoring.

Install

This software was made to be deployed entirely with Docker Compose. Thus, the installation is quite straightforward.

First, install both Docker and Docker Compose. For Debian follow this link for Docker and this one for Docker Compose.

# Clone this repository including all its submodules
git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/oxzi/bbb-broadcaster.git
cd bbb-broadcaster

# Adjust the configuration, see below
cp .env{.template,}
vim .env

# Go for a test drive
docker-compose -f docker-compose.yml - docker-compose.dev.yml up --build

# Go live with valid HTTPS
docker-compose -f docker-compose.yml - docker-compose.prod.yml up --build

Configuration

• VIDEO_MNT specifies where the recordings should be saved.
• LETSENCRYPT_MNT specifies where Let's Encrypt certificates should be saved.
• ACME_EMAIL is your email address, used for Let's Encrypt.
• DOMAIN is your domain for which your certificate will be created.
• BBB_URL is the API endpoint of your BBB instance, e.g., https://bbb.hsmr.cc/bigbluebutton/api.
• BBB_SECRET is your BBB API secret. You can fetch this by bbb-conf --secret on your BBB host.
• BBB_MEETING_ID is the BBB ID of the meeting you want to stream. This ID is not the Greenlight ID within the URL. However, when you are using the Greenlight frontend, you can query the meeting ID via SQL.

  user@bbb:/opt/greenlight$ sudo docker exec -it greenlight_db_1 bash
  
  bash-5.1# psql greenlight_production postgres
  
  greenlight_production=# SELECT bbb_id FROM rooms WHERE uid = 'general';
                    bbb_id
  ------------------------------------------
   trololololololololololololololololololol
  (1 row)
  

• BBB_RESOLUTION for the recording. Beware, large resolutions create huge files.

Prometheus and Grafana

By default, three Prometheus exporters are exposed, each on its own port.

• Port 9100: official Node Exporter
• Port 9101: custom RTMP viewer exporter
• Port 9102: custom HLS viewer exporter

For the two custom exporters a Grafana Dashboard is shipped as grafana_dashboard.json.

On the shoulders of giants

All this is only possible thanks to the following software, those I unfortunately forgot and all their dependencies.

• https://docs.bigbluebutton.org/
• https://github.com/aau-zid/BigBlueButton-liveStreaming
• https://github.com/alfg/docker-nginx-rtmp
• https://github.com/arut/nginx-rtmp-module
• https://github.com/avrahamcornfeld/Varela-Round-Hebrew
• https://github.com/prometheus/node_exporter
• https://github.com/traefik/traefik
• https://github.com/video-dev/hls.js/
• https://nginx.org/
• https://www.ffmpeg.org/