bbb-install is a BASH script that can install BigBlueButton BigBlueButton 2.0 with a single command.
wget -qO- https://ubuntu.bigbluebutton.org/bbb-install.sh | bash -s -- -v xenial-200
You must run this command on a Ubuntu 16.04 64-bit server that meets the minimal server requirements. Also, if the server is behind firewall, such as on an AWS EC2 instance, you'll need to update the firewall settings.
After the command finishes you'll see a confirmation message that BigBlueButton is running. The script also installs the bbb-api demos so you can immediately try out the server.
# Warning: The API demos are installed and accessible from:
#
# http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/demo/demo1.jsp
#
# These API demos allow anyone to access your server without authentication
# to create/manage meetings and recordings. They are for testing purposes only.
# If you are running a production system, remove them by running:
#
# sudo apt-get purge bbb-demo
To test, open the given URL in FireFox (use FireFox until you have a secure socket layer (SSL) certificate install), enter your name and click Join.
You'll now have a BigBlueButton server running ready for testing. The sections below go into futther details how bbb-install.sh works and the configuration options available.
The bbb-install.sh is a shell script that automates the install steps for installing BigBlueButton 2.0.
You'll need a server that meets the minimal server requirements. This can be a dedicated or virtual server.
Furthermore, if you setup a fully qualified domain name (FQDN), such as bbb.example.com, that resolves to the external IP address of the server, then you can use bbb-install.sh to also install
- a 4096 bit secure socket layers (SSL) certificate from Let's Encrypt,
- the latest developer build of the HTML5 client, and/or
- the GreenLight front-end.
We recommend installing a SSL certificate for production BigBlueButton servers as the certificate is a requirement for both Chrome and Safari to enable WebRTC audio for the user.
The source for the script is hosted at github. While you could clone this repository an execute bbb-install.sh at the command line, to make it easy for anyone to run the script with a single command, we host the latest version at https://ubuntu.bigbluebutton.org/bbb-install.sh.
Many companies, such as Digital Ocean, offer virtual and bare metal servers that provide a Ubuntu 16.04 64-bit server with single public IP address (no firewall).
Other companies, such as ScaleWay, Google Compute Engine offer servers that are setup behind network address translation (NAT). That is, they have both an internal and external IP address. The bbb-install.sh will do a bit of sluthing detect if the server has internal/external address and configure BigBlueButton accordingly.
If your server is behind a firewall, such as on Amazon EC2 instance, then there are a few additional steps to configure the settings on your firewall (given below).
Finaly, if you find bbb-install.sh is unable to configure server behind NAT, we recommend going through the step-by-step for installing BigBlueButton.
If you want to install BigBlueButton 2.0 on an Amazon's EC2 instance -- we recommend a c5.xlarge instance type (or faster) when using EC2 -- then before your run bbb-install.sh you first need to configure the server's security group (a 'security group' is Amazon's term for a firewall) to allow incoming traffic on the following ports:
- TCP/IP port 22 (for SSH)
- TCP/IP ports 80/443 (for HTTP/HTTPS)
- TCP/IP port 1935 (for RTMP)
- UDP ports in the range 16384 - 32768 (for FreeSWITCH/HTML5 client RTP streams)
Here's a screen shot of what the security group configuration should look like to allow incoming traffic on the above ports:
Before setting up a hostname, you need to assign an Elastic IP to the server so the IP does not change on reboot.
We also created in installation video on EC2 going through the above steps.
Watch this Install using bbb-install.sh on Digital Ocean for a walkthrough of the configuration options for installing BigBlueButton 2.0 on Digital Ocean with bbb-install.sh.
Watch this Install using bbb-install.sh on EC2 for a walkthrough of installing BigBlueButton 2.0 on Amazon EC2 using bbb-install.sh.
You can get help by passing the -h option.
BigBlueButon 2.0 installer script
USAGE:
bbb-install.sh [OPTIONS]
OPTIONS:
-v <version> Install given version of BigBlueButton (e.g. 'xenial-200') (required)
-s <hostname> Configure server with <hostname>
-e <email> Install SSL certificate from Let's Encrypt using <email>
-t Install HTML5 client (currently under development)
-g Install GreenLight
-p <host> Use apt-get proxy at <host>
-h Print help
EXAMPLES:
./bbb-install.sh -v xenial-200
./bbb-install.sh -v xenial-200 -s bbb.example.com -e [email protected]
./bbb-install.sh -v xenial-200 -s bbb.example.com -e [email protected] -t -g
SUPPORT:
Source: https://github.com/bigbluebutton/bbb-install
Commnity: https://bigbluebutton.org/support
To install BigBlueButton on a Ubuntu 16.04 64-bit server, login as root and run the following command:
wget -qO- https://ubuntu.bigbluebutton.org/bbb-install.sh | bash -s -- -v xenial-200
That's it. The installation should finish with the following message:
** Potential problems described below **
......
# Warning: The API demos are installed and accessible from:
#
# http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/demo/demo1.jsp
#
# These API demos allow anyone to access your server without authentication
# to create/manage meetings and recordings. They are for testing purposes only.
# If you are running a production system, remove them by running:
#
# sudo apt-get purge bbb-demo
The script also installs the bbb-demo package, so you can immediately test out the install.
If you want to remove the API demos, do the command
sudo apt-get purge bbb-demo
If you want to use this server with a front-end, such as Moodle, you can get the server's URL and shared secret with the command sudo bbb-conf --secret.
# bbb-conf --secret
URL: http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/bigbluebutton/
Secret: yyy
Link to the API-Mate:
http://mconf.github.io/api-mate/#server=http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/bigbluebutton/&sharedSecret=yyy
Since the server does not have a SSL certificate, use FireFox for sharing audio (at the time of this writing, FireFox does not require SSL to use WebRTC audio). However, Chrome does require a SSL certificate, so users will get an error when sharing their audio with WebRTC.
We recommend installing an SSL certificate (see next section).
Before bbb-install.sh can install a SSL certificate, you first need to configure a domain name, such as bbb.example.com, to resolve to the public IP address of your server. That is, the command dig bbb.example.com @8.8.8.8 should resolves to the public IP address of your server.
Next, you need a valid e-mail address, such as [email protected], to receive updates from Let's Encrypt.
With these two pieces of information, you can use bbb-install.sh to automate the configuration of BigBlueButton server with an SSL certificate using the following command (here we using the sample hostname and e-mail in the command, but you would need to substitute your serverès hostname and your e-mail address):
wget -qO- https://ubuntu.bigbluebutton.org/bbb-install.sh | bash -s -- -v xenial-200 -s bbb.example.com -e [email protected]
The bbb-install.sh script will also install a cron job for you to automatically renew the Let's Encrypt certificate so it doesn't expire.
To try out the latest build of the latest developer build of the HTML5 client, add the -t option when setting up SSL (the HTML5 client needs SSL installed on the server).
wget -qO- https://ubuntu.bigbluebutton.org/bbb-install.sh | bash -s -- -v xenial-200 -s bbb.example.com -e [email protected] -t
After a few minutes, you'll have the HTML5 client is installed. Use an Android or iOS (iOS 11+) phone/tablet to access your BigBlueButton server at https://bbb.example.com/demo/demo1.jsp and join using the HTML5 client. The BigBlueButton server will detect when you are connecting from a mobile browser and automatically load the HTML5 client instead of the default Flash client. Note: the HTML5 client is under active development and is not ready (yet) for production.
If you want to add a frontend to your BigBlueButton server, where users can easily create meetings and invite others, you can install GreenLight by adding the -g option to the SSL options (GreenLight needs SSL installed on the server).
wget -qO- https://ubuntu.bigbluebutton.org/bbb-install.sh | bash -s -- -v xenial-200 -s bbb.example.com -e [email protected] -g
You can go to https://<hostname>/ (where is the host name for your BigBlueButton server) to launch the GreenLight interface. To give users the ability to create and manage recorded meetings, See the GreenLight documentation for setting up OAuth2 authentication.
Lastly, you could do all the above with a single command:
wget -qO- https://ubuntu.bigbluebutton.org/bbb-install.sh | bash -s -- -v xenial-200 -s bbb.example.com -e [email protected] -t -g
If after the initial installation GreenLight does not run (you get a 500 error when accessing it), you can restart GreenLight with the following steps
docker stop greenlight
docker rm greenlight
docker run -d -p 5000:80 --restart=unless-stopped -v $(pwd)/db/production:/usr/src/app/db/production -v $(pwd)/assets:/usr/src/app/public/system --env-file env --name greenlight bigbluebutton/greenlight
After which, you should be able to open the URL for your server and see the GreenLight interface.
If you have feedback on the script, or need help using it, please post to the BigBlueButton Setup mailing list and we'll help you there.
If you encounter an error with this script, please open GitHub issue and provide steps to reproduce the issue.
If you are running your BigBlueButton behind a firewall, such as on EC2, this script will not configure your firewall.