Step3.md

Configuring BigBlueButton

Now that we've set up BigBlueButton on AWS, it's time to make sure that it suits our needs. Both BigBlueButton and the Greenlight frontend are highly configurable through the shell and a GUI control panel. To start with, let's look at the shell configuration.

Signing in to the instance

1. Log in to the AWS CLI using the script from Step 2:

   #!/bin/bash
   # use aws cli to obtain instanceid i-xxxxx
   instance_id=$(aws ec2 describe-instances --filters \
        "Name=instance-state-name,Values=running" \
        "Name=tag:Name,Values=BigBlueButton-Server" \
        --query 'Reservations[].Instances[].InstanceId' --output text)
   echo "Connecting to $instance_id"
   aws ssm start-session --target "${instance_id}"

Changing the welcome message

1. Navigate to the /classes/ folder, which contains the BigBlueButton properties:

   cd /usr/share/bbb-web/WEB-INF/classes/

2. Open the bigbluebutton.properties file using your text editor of choice:

   nano bigbluebutton.properties

3. Locate the defaultWelcomeMessage parameter, and change it to Welcome to the AWS Programming and Tools Meetup!

4. Locate the defaultWelcomeMessageFooter parameter, and change it to The URL for this workshop is: https://github.com/toshke/workshop-big-blue-button-aws.

5. Restart BigBlueButton to apply your changes:

   sudo bbb-conf --restart

6. Go to the URL of your BigBlueButton server, create a new meeting, and check that the welcome message in the chat window has changed. (This may take a couple of minutes to take effect)

Changing the default presentation

1. Navigate to the bigbluebutton-default folder, and delete the default.pdf file:

   cd /var/www/bigbluebutton-default/
   sudo rm default.pdf

2. Use wget to download the sample PDF file to your server as default.pdf (you may need to use sudo apt install wget to install it):

   wget  -O /var/www/bigbluebutton-default/default.pdf "https://s3-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/workshop-artifacts.programming-tools-meetup.cloud/awspt.pdf"

3. Restart BigBlueButton to apply your changes:

   sudo bbb-conf --restart

4. Go to the URL of your BigBlueButton server, create a new meeting, and check that the default presentation has changed to the Welcome to the AWS Programming and Tools meetup PDF. (This may take a couple of minutes to take effect)

Adding background music when only one person is in a session

For this exercise, we're going to use a royalty-free song by Kevin Macleod of Incompetech. His music is released under a Creative Commons attribution license, which allows use for commercial purposes. This means that you can follow these instructions to install his music on a commercial BigBlueButton server as well.

1. Navigate to the autoload_configs folder:

   cd /opt/freeswitch/conf/autoload_configs/

2. Open the conference.conf.xml file in your text editor of choice:

   nano conference.conf.xml

3. At approximately line 200, uncomment the following line:

   <param name="moh-sound" value="$${hold_music}"/>

   Save the file.

4. Use wget to download the music file to your server:

   sudo wget  -P /opt/freeswitch/share/freeswitch/sounds "https://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/mp3-royaltyfree/Off%20to%20Osaka.mp3"

5. Navigate to the conf folder:

   cd /opt/freeswitch/conf/

6. Open the vars.xml file in your text editor of choice:

   nano vars.xml

7. Change the hold_music parameter to refer to the music file we uploaded:

   <X-PRE-PROCESS cmd="set" data="hold_music=/opt/freeswitch/share/freeswitch/sounds/Off%20to%20Osaka.mp3" />

   Save the file.

8. Restart BigBlueButton to apply your changes:

   sudo bbb-conf --restart

9. Go to the URL of your BigBlueButton server, create a new meeting, and check that the hold music is audible. (This may take a couple of minutes to take effect)

Challenge

Try using the instructions under User Authentication here to set up either Google or Office OAuth for the Greenlight frontend.

Once you're done, go to Step 4: Using the admin console and inviting friends.