Jitsi Deployment How-To

DISCLAIMER: this is not legal nor technical advice. It is just a WIP proposal, open to discussion, on how a Jitsi server can be quickly (and legally) deployed in order to host one’s own private videomeetings, based on authors’ practical experiences.

Jitsi official quick-install how-to covers only a very basic installation, which may not be deemed as privacy compliant (no authentication enabled, no privacy policy regarding personal data processed to run the service1).

Moreover, since authentication is managed through an external component (Prosody), Jitsi documentation does not cover it, so one has to look at Prosody documentation to figure out how users can change their password set by sysadmin – which is a fundamental requirement for privacy compliance – or how to install non-self-signed certificates for prosody – which are necessary to remotely manage user accounts in a secure way; and so on.

Finally, some important tuning settings (e.g. video management settings to make Jitsi usable by teams of more than 6/10 people) may be difficult to find, since relevant information is splitted among Jitsi subcomponents’ repos.

This how-to tries to fill gaps and put together some sparse pieces of Jitsi and Prosody official documentation, in order to get a self-hosted videoconferencing solution that can compete with mainstream proprietary solutions and that can be privacy compliant, too.