BigBlueButton™ integration for Nextcloud

This app allows to create meetings with an external installation of BigBlueButton.

👏 Developer wanted! If you have time it would be awesome if you could help to enhance this application.

This app uses BigBlueButton and is not endorsed or certified by BigBlueButton Inc. BigBlueButton and the BigBlueButton Logo are trademarks of BigBlueButton Inc.

😍 Features

This integration provides the following features:

• Room setup Create multiple room configurations with name, welcome message, ...
• Share guest link Share the room link with all your guests
• Share rooms Share rooms with members, groups or circles
• Custom presentation Start a room with a selected presentation from your file browser
• Manage recordings View, share and delete recordings for your rooms
• Restrictions Restrict room creation to certain groups
• Activities Get an overview of your room activities

🚀 Install it

The easiest way to install this app is by using the Nextcloud app store. If you like to build from source, please continue reading.

To install it change into your Nextcloud's apps directory:

cd nextcloud/apps

Then run:

git clone https://github.com/sualko/cloud_bbb.git bbb

Then install the dependencies using:

make build

⚙️ Configure it

Get your BBB API url and secret by executing sudo bbb-conf --secret on your BBB server.

$ sudo bbb-conf --secret

    URL: https://bbb.your.domain/bigbluebutton/
    Secret: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz012345679

    Link to the API-Mate:
    https://mconf.github.io/api-mate/#server=https://...

Enter these values in the additional settings section on the admin configuration page of your Nextcloud instance.

Manual configuration (for experts)

If you prefer not to use the web interface for configuration, you will find all used configuration keys in the list below. Please beware that there will be no check if those values are correct. Therefore this is not the recommended way. The syntax to set all settings is occ config:app:set bbb KEY --value "VALUE".

Key	Description
app.navigation	Set to true to show navigation entry
app.navigation.name	Defines the navigation label. Default "BigBlueButton".
api.url	URL to your BBB server. Should start with https://
api.secret	Secret of your BBB server
api.meta_analytics-callback-url	URL which gets called after meetings ends to generate statistics. See bbb-analytics.
app.shortener	Value of your shortener service. Should start with https:// and contain {token}.
avatar.path	Absolute path to an optional avatar cache directory.
avatar.url	URL which serves avatar.path to be used as avatar cache.

Avatar cache (v2.2+)

The generation of avatars puts a high load on your Nextcloud instance, since the number of requests increases squarely to the number of participants in a room. To mitigate this situation, this app provides an optional avatar file cache. To activate the cache avatar.path and avatar.url have to be configured. avatar.path must provide an absolute path (e.g. /srv/bbb-avatar-cache/) to a directory which is writable by the PHP user. avatar.url must contain the url which serves all files from avatar.path. To bypass browser connection limits we recommend to setup a dedicated host.

Example Apache configuration for a dedicated host with avatar.path = /srv/bbb-avatar-cache/ and avatar.url = https://avatar-cache.your-nextcloud.com/:

<VirtualHost *:443>
        ServerName avatar-cache.your-nextcloud.com

        Header always set Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=15768000;"

        DocumentRoot /srv/bbb-avatar-cache
        <Directory /srv/bbb-avatar-cache>
                Options -FollowSymLinks -Indexes
        </Directory>

        SSLEngine On
        # SSL config...
</VirtualHost>

For additional security, we recommend to disable directory listing, symlinks and any language interpreter such as php for the cache directory.

Cached avatars are usually deleted as soon as the meeting ends. In cases the BBB server shuts down unexpected, we provide the bbb:clear-avatar-cache occ command (example use: ./occ bbb:clear-avatar-cache).

:bowtie: User guide

Create your first room

Go to the BigBlueButton section inside your personal settings page and enter a room name. That's it. You can now distribute the room url.

Enter a room from files

Use the ... menu and select the desired BBB configuration to enter the room. Beware that if the room is already running the presentation will not be updated. Entering a room with a defined presentation works only if link shares are enabled and do not require authentication. See #1 for details.

📓 Notes

• By using the Link Editor you can share rooms as any other file

⛏️ Troubleshooting

• Before installing, make sure your BBB is running correctly
• If the room doesn't appear in the ... menu of files, a browser/cache reload might help
• To share an audio (mp3) or video (mp4) file with your audience follow these steps (more info in #148):
  • create a public share of the exact file
  • copy the location of the share from the share information screen into your clipboard
  • open big blue button, press the plus icon in the lower left corner
  • click on add external video
  • paste the url from your clipboard and append the following string for audio /download?.mp3 or /download?.mp4 for video files
• To connect to a ScaleLite server, use the url like https://yourscalelite.url/bigbluebutton/ without additional api/ and as secret ScaleLite's LOADBALANCER_SECRET

❤️ Sponsors

Writing such an application is a lot of work and therefore we are specially thankful for people and organisations who are sponsoring features or bug fixes:

• Medienwerkstatt Minden-Lübbecke e.V. manage recordings (#19)
• Deutscher Bundesjugendring version 0.4.0, version 0.5.0
• Graz University of Technology form action (#47), navigation entry (#31), restrictions (#43, #53), circles (#61)
• Arawa UX audit
• Niedersächsisches Landesinstitut für schulische Qualitätsentwicklung – Netzwerk Medienberatung moderator url, UX improvements
• Integrierte Gesamtschule Lengede theme, join options

If you are looking for other ways to contribute to this project, you are welcome to look at our contributor guidelines. Every contribution is valuable 🎉.