Jangouts (for "Janus Hangouts") is a solution for videoconferencing based on WebRTC and the excellent Janus Gateway with a user interface loosely inspired by Google Hangouts. It aims to provide a completely self-hosted open source alternative to Google Hangouts and similar solutions. Currently Jangouts supports conferences with video, audio, screen sharing and textual chat organized into an unlimited amount of conference rooms with a configurable limit of participants per room.
Jangouts is a JavaScript application running exclusively client-side (i.e. in the browser). The server simply needs to provide a bunch of static files through a web server.
All the server-side WebRTC handling is performed by Janus Gateway, so the first requirement is a
running janus server with support for data channels compiled in, with the videoroom plugin enabled
and with a valid list of rooms in the janus.plugin.videoroom.cfg file.
There are many ways to get a Janus Gateway server running in your system. Check JANUS.md for some guidance.
The easiest way to get Jangouts is to download the latest archive from the Jangouts releases page
at Github. For deployment purposes, the only
relevant directory in that archive is the one called build, which contains the files to be served
by the HTTP server to the participants' browsers.
A file called config.json can be added to that directory to point the participants to any Janus
server, to enable extra debugging, or to tweak Jangouts in several ways. Use the file
config.sample.json as starting point. It's fine to operate Jangouts without a config.json file
or to have some parameters set to null in that file, Jangouts will try to guess the proper value
during runtime.
Given than a Janus Gateway server is running and reachable and that config.json contains the
proper values (in case something needs to be adjusted), all that needs to be done is to serve the
content of the build directory to the clients. Any web server, such as Apache, can be used for
that purpose.
The simplest way (although certainly not the cleanest) to do such thing in an (open)SUSE system would be:
sudo zypper in apache2- Copy the content of
builddirectly into/srv/www/htdocs/ sudo systemctl start apache2.service
Done. At that point you should be able to access your own instance of Jangouts just by pointing your
browser to http://localhost/.
See the deployment instructions for more information about how to properly configure Apache.
Browsers will refuse to allow screen sharing through WebRTC for connections not using SSL. In most cases, they will even refuse to send any WebRTC content at all, neither video or audio. Providing HTTPS access to both the files and the Janus gateway, like shown in the deployment instructions, may be crucial for a proper usage experience.
Jangouts includes limited support for plugins in order to provide additional functionality. But plugins are temporarily disabled in the current version of Jangouts. If you are interested on Jangouts plugins, use Jangouts version 0.5.x for the time being. Information about configuring the existing plugins is found in the README.md file for that release.
If Jangouts does not work, please check the troubleshooting guide.
In order to modify Jangouts, it's necessary to install some development tools. That setup is detailed in the development instructions.
- Janus Gateway developers, for such a powerful and versatile tool.
- SUSE Linux, for the awesome Hack Week initiative.
This software is released under the terms of the MIT License. See the license file for more information.
Jangouts developers can be usually found at: