roipoussiere / galene

The Galène videoconference server

Installation

Build the galene binary

You will need Go 1.13 or later (type go version). Then do:

CGO_ENABLED=0 go build -ldflags='-s -w'

Set the server administrator credentials

This step is optional.

mkdir data
echo 'god:topsecret' > data/passwd

Set up a group

A group called groupname is is set up by creating a file groups/groupname.json.

mkdir groups
vi groups/groupname.json

A group with a single operator and no password for ordinary users looks like this:

{
    "op": [{"username": "jch", "password": "1234"}],
    "presenter": [{}]
}

A group with one operator and two users looks like this:

{
    "op": [{"username": "jch", "password": "1234"}],
    "presenter": [
        {"username": "mom", "password": "0000"},
        {"username": "dad", "password": "1234"}
    ]
}

More options are described under Details of group definitions below.

Test locally

./galene &

You should be able to access Galène at https://localhost:8443. Connect to the group that you have just set up in two distinct browser windows, then press Ready in one of the two; you should see a video in the other.

If you have set up a TURN server, type /relay-test in the chat box; if the TURN server is properly configured, you should see a message saying that the relay test has been successful. (The relay test will fail if you didn't configure a TURN server; this is normal, and nothing to worry about.)

Configure your server's firewall

If your server has a global IPv4 address and there is no firewall, there is nothing to do.

If your server has a global IPv4 address, then the firewall must, at a strict minimum, allow incoming traffic to TCP port 8443 (or whatever is configured with the -http command-line option) and TCP port 1194 (or whatever is configured with the -turn command-line option). For best performance, it should also allow UDP traffic to the TURN port, and UDP traffic to ephemeral (high-numbered) ports.

If your server only has a global IPv6 address, then you should probably configure an external double-stack (IPv4 and IPv6) TURN server: see "ICE Servers" below.

If your server is behind NAT, then the best solution is to run an external TURN server that is not behind NAT (see "ICE Servers" below). If that is not possible, then you should configure your NAT device to forward, at a minimum, ports 8443 (TCP) and 1194 (TCP and UDP). In addition, you should add the option -turn 203.0.113.1:1194 to Galène's command line, where 203.0.113.1 is your NAT's external (global) IPv4 address.

Cross-compile for your server

This step is only required if your server runs a different OS or has a different CPU than your build machine.

For a Linux server with an Intel or AMD CPU:

CGO_ENABLED=0 GOOS=linux GOARCH=amd64 go build -ldflags='-s -w'

For a Raspberry Pi 1:

CGO_ENABLED=0 GOOS=linux GOARCH=arm GOARM=6 go build -ldflags='-s -w'

For a BeagleBone or a Raspberry Pi 2 or later:

CGO_ENABLED=0 GOOS=linux GOARCH=arm GOARM=7 go build -ldflags='-s -w'

For a 64-bit ARM board (Olimex Olinuxino-A64, Pine64, etc.):

CGO_ENABLED=0 GOOS=linux GOARCH=arm64 go build -ldflags='-s -w'

For a 32-bit MIPS board with no hardware floating point (WNDR3800, etc.):

CGO_ENABLED=0 GOOS=linux GOARCH=mips GOMIPS=softfloat go build -ldflags='-s -w'

Deploy to your server

Set up a user galene on your server, then do:

rsync -a galene static data groups [e-mail]:

If you don't have a TLS certificate, Galène will generate a self-signed certificate automatically (and print a warning to the logs). If you have a certificate, install it in the files data/cert.pem and data/key.pem:

ssh [e-mail]
sudo cp /etc/letsencrypt/live/server.example.org/fullchain.pem data/cert.pem
sudo cp /etc/letsencrypt/live/server.example.org/key.pem data/key.pem
sudo chown galene:galene data/*.pem
sudo chmod go-rw data/key.pem

Now run the binary on the server:

ssh [e-mail]
ulimit -n 65536
nohup ./galene &

If you are using runit, use a script like the following:

#!/bin/sh
exec 2>&1
cd ~galene
ulimit -n 65536
exec setuidgid galene ./galene

If you are using systemd:

[Unit]
Description=Galene
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
WorkingDirectory=/home/galene
User=galene
Group=galene
ExecStart=/home/galene/galene
LimitNOFILE=65536

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Usage

Locations

There is a landing page at the root of the server. It contains a form for typing the name of a group, and a clickable list of public groups.

Groups are available under /group/groupname. You may share this URL with others, there is no need to go through the landing page.

Recordings can be accessed under /recordings/groupname. This is only available to the administrator of the group.

Some statistics are available under /stats. This is only available to the server administrator.

Side menu

There is a menu on the right of the user interface. This allows choosing the camera and microphone and setting the video throughput. The Blackboard mode checkbox increases resolution and sacrifices framerate in favour of image quality. The Play local file dialog allows streaming a video from a local file.

Commands

Typing a line starting with a slash / in the chat dialogue causes a command to be sent to the server. Type /help to get the list of available commands; the output depends on whether you are an operator or not.

Details of group definitions

Groups are defined by files in the ./groups directory (this may be configured by the -groups command-line option, try ./galene -help). The definition for the group called groupname is in the file groups/groupname.json; it does not contain the group name, which makes it easy to copy or link group definitions. You may use subdirectories: a file groups/teaching/networking.json defines a group called teching/networking.

Every group definition file contains a JSON directory. All fields are optional, but unless you specify at least one user definition (op, presenter, or other), nobody will be able to join the group. The following fields are allowed:

• op, presenter, other: each of these is an array of user definitions (see below) and specifies the users allowed to connect respectively with operator privileges, with presenter privileges, and as passive listeners;
• public: if true, then the group is visible on the landing page;
• description: a human-readable description of the group; this is displayed on the landing page for public groups;
• contact: a human-readable contact for this group, such as an e-mail address;
• comment: a human-readable string;
• max-clients: the maximum number of clients that may join the group at a time;
• max-history-age: the time, in seconds, during which chat history is kept (default 14400, i.e. 4 hours);
• allow-recording: if true, then recording is allowed in this group;
• allow-anonymous: if true, then users may connect with an empty username;
• allow-subgroups: if true, then subgroups of the form group/subgroup are automatically created when first accessed;
• autolock: if true, the group will start locked and become locked whenever there are no clients with operator privileges;
• autokick: if true, all clients will be kicked out whenever there are no clients with operator privileges; this is not recommended, prefer the autolock option instead;
• redirect: if set, then attempts to join the group will be redirected to the given URL; most other fields are ignored in this case;
• codecs: this is a list of codecs allowed in this group. The default is ["vp8", "opus"].

Supported video codecs include:

• "vp8" (compatible with all supported browsers);
• "vp9" (better video quality than "vp8", but incompatible with older versions of Mac OS);
• "h264" (incompatible with Debian, Ubuntu, and some Android devices, recording is not supported).

Supported audio codecs include "opus", "g722", "pcmu" and "pcma". There is no good reason to use anything except Opus.

A user definition is a dictionary with the following fields:

• username: the username of the user; if omitted, any username is allowed;
• password: if omitted, then no password is required. Otherwise, this can either be a string, specifying a plain text password, or a dictionary generated by the galene-password-generator utility.

For example,

{"username": "jch", "password": "1234"}

specifies user jch with password 1234, while

{"password": "1234"}

specifies that any (non-empty) username will do, and

{}

allows any (non-empty) username with any password.

If you don't wish to store cleartext passwords on the server, you may generate hashed password with the galene-password-generator utility. A user entry with a hashed password looks like this:

{
    "username": "jch",
    "password": {
        "type": "pbkdf2",
        "hash": "sha-256",
        "key": "f591c35604e6aef572851d9c3543c812566b032b6dc083c81edd15cc24449913",
        "salt": "92bff2ace56fe38f",
        "iterations": 4096
    }
}

ICE Servers

ICE is the NAT and firewall traversal protocol used by WebRTC. ICE can make use of two kinds of servers to help with NAT traversal: STUN servers, that help punching holes in well-behaved NATs, and TURN servers, that serve as relays for traffic. TURN is a superset of STUN: no STUN server is necessary if a TURN server is available.

Galène includes an IPv4-only TURN server, which is controlled by the -turn command-line option. If its value is set to the empty string "", then the built-in server is disabled. If its value is a colon followed with a port number, for example :1194, then the TURN server will listen on all public IPv4 addresses of the local host, over UDP and TCP. If the value of this option is a socket address, such as 203.0.113.1:1194, then the TURN server will listen on all addresses of the local host but assume that the address seen by the clients is the one given in the option; this is useful when running behind NAT with port forwarding set up. The default value is -turn auto, which starts a TURN server on port 1194 unless there is a data/ice-servers.json file.

Some users may prefer to use an external ICE server. In that case, the built-in TURN server should be disabled (-turn "" or the default -turn auto), and a working ICE configuration should be given in the file data/ice-servers.json. In the case of a single STUN server, it should look like this:

[
    {
        "urls": [
            "stun:stun.example.org"
        ]
    }
]

In the case of s single TURN server, the ice-servers.json file should look like this:

[
    {
        "urls": [
            "turn:turn.example.org:443",
            "turn:turn.example.org:443?transport=tcp"
        ],
        "username": "galene",
        "credential": "secret"
    }
]

If you prefer to use coturn's use-auth-secret option, then the ice-servers.json file should look like this:

[
    {
        "Urls": [
            "turn:turn.example.com:443",
            "turn:turn.example.com:443?transport=tcp"
        ],
        "username": "galene",
        "credential": "secret",
        "credentialType": "hmac-sha1"
    }
]

For redundancy, you may set up multiple TURN servers, and ICE will use the first one that works. If an ice-servers.json file is present and Galène's built-in TURN server is enabled, then the external server will be used in preference to the built-in server.

Further information

Galène's web page is at https://galene.org.

Answers to common questions and issues are at https://galene.org#faq.

-- Juliusz Chroboczek https://www.irif.fr/~jch/