Host your own video service app using Jitsi

2 min readNov 22, 2020

Ready to do something new? Want to host your own video service app? Great. I will show you how to do it quickly. In this article, we will be learning how to host your own Jitsi app. I am assuming that you people are already knowing how to create a virtual space like AWS’s EC2 instance or Azure’s VM. We will be hosting our code in Ubuntu Machine of 4 GB Ram, 2 CPUs, and 30 GB storage.

Get your VM’s access

Connect to your instance or virtual machine using SSH.

ssh -i <your-permission-file.pem> <user-name>@<server'-IP>
eg: ssh -i test.pem azureuser@13.76.157.xxx

Setup Domain Name

Go to you domain name provider
Enter DNS Management.
Add a new A Record pointing to Virtual Server’s Public IP.
let’s say you have a domain name that is “myvideoapp.com”. You can add a new subdomain called “meet” by adding a new A-record. So, your new meet domain name will “meet.myvideoapp.com”
We will be using this domain name for further steps.

Pre-Configuration

get root access as all commands will require sudo. sudo su -
check iptables. Here you would find iptables to be empty.

iptables -L -n

check firewall status. You will find that firewall is disabled

ufw status

Enable Firewall ufw enable.
Allow Firewall for given ports.

ufw allow in ssh

ufw allow in 80/tcp

ufw allow in 443/tcp

ufw allow in 10000:20000/udp

ufw allow in ssh,ufw allow in 80/tcp, ufw allow in 443/tcp,ufw allow in 10000:20000/udp
check firewall status. ufw status

Add Jitsi Repo

curl https://download.jitsi.org/jitsi-key.gpg.key | sudo sh -c 'gpg --dearmor > /usr/share/keyrings/jitsi-keyring.gpg'echo 'deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/jitsi-keyring.gpg] https://download.jitsi.org stable/' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/jitsi-stable.list > /dev/null

Install

nginx apt install nginx
jitsi-meet apt install jitsi-meet
Enter your domain name. eg: “meet.myvideoapp.com”
Select the “Install self-signed certificate” option for the SSL certificate.
Run the script to install SSL cert

/usr/share/jitsi-meet/scripts/install-letsencrypt-cert.sh

Extras

If you want to create your own SSL certificate then this is a good place to go.

https://certbot.eff.org/lets-encrypt/ubuntubionic-webproduct

This is currently written to quickly host your app. I will update this to a more read-friendly one if someone wants it.

check iptables again. iptables -L -n