Jitsi Meet - Secure, Simple and Scalable Video Conferences

Jitsi Meet is an open-source (Apache) WebRTC JavaScript application that uses Jitsi Videobridge to provide high quality, secure and scalable video conferences. You can see Jitsi Meet in action here at the session #482 of the VoIP Users Conference.

The Jitsi Meet client runs in your browser, without the need for installing anything on your computer. You can also try it out yourself at https://meet.jit.si .

Jitsi Meet allows for very efficient collaboration. It allows users to stream their desktop or only some windows. It also supports shared document editing with Etherpad.

Installation

On the client side, no installation is necessary. You just point your browser to the URL of your deployment. This section is about installing the Jitsi Meet suite on your server and hosting your own conferencing service.

Installing Jitsi Meet is quite a simple experience. For Debian-based systems, we recommend following the quick-install document, which uses the package system.

For other systems, or if you wish to install all components manually, see the detailed manual installation instructions.

Download

You can download Debian/Ubuntu binaries:

• stable (instructions)
• testing (instructions)
• nightly (instructions)

You can download source archives (produced by make source-package):

• source builds

You can get our mobile versions from here:

• Android
• iOS

Building the sources

Node.js >= 6 is required.

On Debian/Ubuntu systems, the required packages can be installed with:

sudo apt-get install npm nodejs-legacy
cd jitsi-meet
npm install

To build the Jitsi Meet application, just type

make

Working with the library sources (lib-jitsi-meet)

By default the library is build from its git repository sources. The default dependency path in package.json is :

"lib-jitsi-meet": "jitsi/lib-jitsi-meet",

To work with local copy you must change the path to:

"lib-jitsi-meet": "file:///Users/name/local-lib-jitsi-meet-copy",

To make the project you must force it to take the sources as ‘npm update’ will not do it.

npm install lib-jitsi-meet --force && make

Or if you are making only changes to the library:

npm install lib-jitsi-meet --force && make deploy-lib-jitsi-meet

Alternative way is to use npm link. It allows to link lib-jitsi-meet dependency to local source in few steps:

cd lib-jitsi-meet

# create global symlink for lib-jitsi-meet package
npm link

cd ../jitsi-meet

# create symlink from the local node_modules folder to the global lib-jitsi-meet symlink
npm link lib-jitsi-meet

So now after changes in local lib-jitsi-meet repository you can rebuild it with npm run install and your jitsi-meet repository will use that modified library. Note: when using node version 4.x, the make file of jitsi-meet do npm update which will delete the link, no longer the case with version 6.x.

If you do not want to use local repository anymore you should run

cd jitsi-meet
npm unlink lib-jitsi-meet
npm install

Running with webpack-dev-server for development

Use it at the CLI, type

node_modules/.bin/webpack-dev-server

By default the backend deployment used is beta.meet.jit.si, you can point the Jitsi-Meet app at a different backend by using a proxy server. To do this set the WEBPACK_DEV_SERVER_PROXY_TARGET variable, type

WEBPACK_DEV_SERVER_PROXY_TARGET=https://your-example-server.com node_modules/.bin/webpack-dev-server

The app should be running at https://localhost:8080/

Contributing

If you are looking to contribute to Jitsi Meet, first of all, thank you! Please see our guidelines for contributing.

Embedding in external applications

Jitsi Meet provides a very flexible way of embedding it in external applications by using the Jitsi Meet API.

Security

WebRTC today does not provide a way of conducting multiparty conversations with end-to-end encryption. As a matter of fact, unless you consistently vocally compare DTLS fingerprints with your peers, the same goes for one-to-one calls. As a result when using a Jitsi Meet instance, your stream is encrypted on the network but decrypted on the machine that hosts the bridge.

The Jitsi Meet architecture allows you to deploy your own version, including all server components, and in that case your security guarantees will be roughly equivalent to these of a direct one-to-one WebRTC call. This is what’s unique to Jitsi Meet in terms of security.

The meet.jit.si service is maintained by the Jitsi team at Atlassian.

Mobile app

Jitsi Meet is also available as a React Native app for Android and iOS. Instructions on how to build it can be found here.

Acknowledgements

Jitsi Meet started out as a sample conferencing application using Jitsi Videobridge. It was originally developed by then ESTOS’ developer Philipp Hancke who then contributed it to the community where development continues with joint forces!