Self sign certificate bigbluebutton

Question

I have a local server without any domain or public IP for that. I'm gonna to setup SSL self sign certificate for BigBlueButton. How I can do it in my local server?

Answer 1

Without host and domain names, self-signed certificates will be the only option which means they will not be valid SSL certificates. I don't know BigBlueButtom but it's documentation doesn't recommend this set up for production environments. Not every browser will accept it either.

However, if you want to give it a try, you can generate self-signed SSL certs on Linux using this command:

sudo openssl req -x509 -nodes -days 365 -newkey rsa:2048 -keyout selfsigned.key -out selfsigned.crt

These options will create both a key file and a certificate. You will be asked a few questions about the server in order to embed the information correctly in the certificate.

And then you can try to adapt the instructions here.

Answer 2

I was setting up BBB environment recently. Self-signed certificate is no good. To get it working I had to:

1. Use a real server setup (with let's encrypt) and a real domain to get real certificates

2. copy the certificates to my local development setup (and update nginx config of course)

3. set up /etc/hosts locally

Answer 3

Use real SSL certificate. I had to:

1. Install BBB. Use ip instead hostname. See

https://docs.bigbluebutton.org/2.2/install.html#configure-nginx-to-use-https

Example:

wget -qO- https://ubuntu.bigbluebutton.org/bbb-install.sh | bash -s -- -v bionic-230 -s 10.211.55.9 -e me@example.com  -a -w

2. Configure nginx to use HTTPS for you real domain (Order of certificates is very important). See

https://docs.bigbluebutton.org/2.2/install.html#configure-nginx-to-use-https

3. Add to hosts file ip and you domain. Example:

   10.211.55.9 example.com

4. Use command to change domain.

   bbb-conf --setip example.com