BigBlueButton Free Video Conferencing Software
BigBlueButton Video Conferencing System For Online Webinars
BigBlueButton is a free video collaboration software that provides seamless integration with popular platforms such as Drupal, WordPress, Redmine, and Canvas.
Overview
BigBlueButton is an open source free video collaboration software designed particularly for the educational market. There are several features packaged together in this remote meeting solution. It offers a complete solution to conduct a virtual session for students and teachers. Therefore, It provides robust features such as video conferencing, shared whiteboard, electronic hand-raising, HD Audio, on-demand Webcasting, file sharing, presentation tools, Screen sharing, send public/private messages, chats with emojis.
This web conferencing system is highly extensible and provides integrations with other powerful platforms. However, it gives provision to integrate it with other software that includes Drupal, Redmine, Canvas, WordPress, ATutor, Chamilo, Schoology, and many more. All these integrations make this self hosted web conferencing solution the best choice as an online learning management system. Moreover, the BigBlueButton app is an HTML5 supported user interface that supports mobile layouts and runs on all major browsers.
BigBlueButton is mainly written in JavaScript along with the input of other languages such as Java, HTML5, Scala Ruby, Groovy, and CSS. This self-hosted remote meeting solution provides a well-designed dashboard where a user can navigate easily. In addition, there is complete support available regarding the usage, deployment, and development of this online web conferencing software.
System Requirements
Requirements to setup BigBlueButton include:
- Java 11 JDK
- Meteor version 1.8.x
- Node.js 10.20.1+
- MongoDB
Features
BigBlueButton offers the following key features:
- Open Source
- Session Recording
- File Sharing
- Screen Sharing
- WebRTC Compatible
- Support For Third Party Software
- HD Audio
- Secure
- Multi-user Whiteboard
- Real-time Chats
- Support Emojis
- Polling
- Robust
- Parent / Student Portal
- Extensible
Installation Instructions
Before setting up the development environment, you first need to setup a BigBlueButton 2.2 server that can be found at this link
First, run the following command:
sudo apt-get install wget
Now, run the command to install core development tools
sudo apt-get install git-core ant ant-contrib openjdk-8-jdk-headless
With the JDK installed, you need to set the JAVA_HOME variable. Edit ~/.profile
vi ~/.profile<br></br>
Add the following line at the end of the file
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-8-openjdk-amd64
Reload your profile (this will happen automatically when you next login, but we’ll do it explicitly here to load the new environment variable).
source ~/.profile
Do a quick test to ensure JAVA_HOME is set.
echo $JAVA_HOME /usr/lib/jvm/java-8-openjdk-amd64
In the next step, you need to install a number of tools using sdkman.
curl -s “https://get.sdkman.io” | bash<br></br>source “$HOME/.sdkman/bin/sdkman-init.sh”<br></br>sdk install gradle 5.5.1<br></br>sdk install grails 3.3.9<br></br>sdk install sbt 1.2.8<br></br>sdk install maven 3.5.0<br></br>
For setting up the code, Fork the BigBlueButton repository into your GitHub account and then clone it.
Run the following command to add the remote repository to our local clone.
git remote add upstream https://github.com/bigbluebutton/bigbluebutton.git<br></br>
Then, run the following commands to fetch the most up to date version of the remote repository.
git fetch upstream
After that, create a new branch to start your work and base the v2.2.x-release release branch
git checkout -b my-changes-branch upstream/v2.2.x-release
After setting up the server, we will setup the front end. Run the following commands to install Meteor.js
cd ~/dev/bigbluebutton/bigbluebutton-html5<br data-rich-text-line-break="true"></br>curl https://install.meteor.com/ | sh
Next, there is one change required to settings.yml to get webcam and screen share working in the client (assuming you’re using HTTPS already). The first step is to find the value for kurento.wsUrl packaged settings.yml.
grep "wsUrl" /usr/share/meteor/bundle/programs/server/assets/app/config/settings.yml
Next, edit the development settings.yml and change wsUrl to match what was retrieved before.
vi private/config/settings.yml
You’re now ready to run the HTML5 code. First shut down the packaged version of the HTML5 client so you are not running two copies in parallel.
sudo systemctl stop bbb-html5
Finally, install the npm dependencies and run the front end with the following commands:
meteor npm install<br></br>npm start<br></br>
