This program parses BigBlueButton logs for a specific date, looking for meeting start and stop events, and user join and left events. Can filter events based on room name and user name. Can be run on its own or included as a module in other projects.
It can be used to extract user attendance to meetings, for example for students attending online classes.
By default it outputs all events occurred in the current day from default log file, /var/log/bigbluebutton/bbb-web.log.
Results are put in a CSV file that can be then opened in LibreOffice Calc for further processing.
Columns output:
| Date | Time | Room | User | Event |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Events may be meeting start, meeting end, user join and user left.
When meetings end before a specific user left, no user left event is reported for that user.
Download, fork or copy paste the script to your machine and make it executable.
$ chmod +x bbbattendance.py $ bbbattendance.py [-h] [-r ROOM] [-u USER] [-l LOGFILE] [-o OUTFILE.CSV] [date]All the arguments and options are optional.
Dates should be formatted in ISO 8601 format (i.e. YYYY-MM-DD, like in 2020-12-31). If no date is provided, the current date will be used.
Room and user names with spaces should be in quotes. If no room (or user) is specified, all the rooms (and users) found are reported.
By default it reads default log file, /var/log/bigbluebutton/bbb-web.log. Since log files are often rotated, you may need to specify a different file to read.
Results are put in a CSV file. If no file name is specified by the user, data is written to a file beginning with bbb-report (for example: bbb-report-2020-12-31-roomname-username.csv).
Note: you should check the exact spelling of the user name, since often guests can choose any name they wish, and typos can happen.
Get attendance for room "Main Room" on March the 4th, 2020:
$ bbbattendance.py 2020-03-04 -r "Main Room"Get attendance for user John Doe in room "Main Room" on March the 4th, 2020:
$ bbbattendance.py -r "Main Room" 2020-03-04 -u "John Doe"Get attendance for all the rooms on March the 4th, 2020 from bbb-web.log, and write the report to ~/myreport.csv:
$ bbbattendance.py -l bbb-web.log -o ~/myreport.csv 2020-03-04The script depends on Python 3. On Python < 3.7 it requires also the iso8601 module.
To install the iso8601 module, use pip3 install iso8601 or apt install python3-iso8601 (on Debian and Ubuntu).
This program has been written to record student attendance to online classes at Istituto Tolman, a Psychotherapy school in Italy.