BBB Load balancer

This project was developed to load balance BigBlueButton servers. It is written in PHP and based on the Symfony Standard Edition framework. A web application is included to manage servers and users, but it can also be managed with the API. The API docs can be found on the web app.

The loadbalancer uses the same API as the default BBB API.

The following API methods are currently supported:

• create
• join
• end
• isMeetingRunning
• getMeetingInfo
• getMeetings

The following API methods are currently NOT supported:

• getDefaultConfigXML
• setConfigXML
• getRecordings
• publishRecordings
• deleteRecordings

Quick setup

You can use a chef recipe to setup your server or setup a vagrant box.

https://github.com/brunogoossens/BBBLB-Chef-cookbook

Setup

Dependencies

php5-common
php5-cli
php5-xcache
php5-mongo
php5-curl
mongodb
npm
nodejs
git
curl

Get the code (change the destination)

$ git clone https://github.com/brunogoossens/BBB-Load-Balancer.git /path/of/project
$ cd /path/of/project

Get NPM packages

$ npm install

Edit the config file

$ cp app/config/parameters.yml.dist app/config/parameters.yml

Change the bbb.salt value inside the new file. The salt must be the same on all BBB servers You can also change other values if you like.

Get composer

$ curl -s https://getcomposer.org/installer | php

Install packages with composer

$ ./composer.phar install

Start server (without apache or nginx)

$ app/console server:run --env=prod

If you want to configure an other server like apache or nginx, you can follow this guide. Make sure if you use a webserver, that it has write access to the app/cache and app/log folders. You can read more about this here. Search the page for "Setting up Permissions".

To automatically enable and disable servers based on there status, you can add this cronjob.

* * * * * /path/of/project/app/console bbblb:servers:check --env=prod

To remove stopped meetings from the load balancer, add this cronjob.

* * * * * /path/of/project/app/console bbblb:meetings:cleanup --env=prod

Adding BBB Servers to the load balancer

Access the web interface: http://127.0.0.1:8000 (or vhost configured in apache or nginx) The first time you access this page, you must create an admin user. After creating this user, you can manage the BBB load balancer. You need to add at least 1 BBB server to the list of servers before you can use the load balancer. After setting up the load balancer, you should change your client applications BBB url to the new BBB load balancer URL. (http://127.0.0.1/bigbluebutton)

Updating the loadbalancer

So we added cool new features to the repository but you have deployed old code. You should do the following commands to get the newest code.

$ cd /path/of/project/bbb-load-balancer
$ git pull origin master
$ app/console cache:clear --env=prod
$ app/console assets:install
$ app/console assetic:dump --env=prod