📹 Jitsi as a Service Application

A web application for hosting Jitsi as a Service meetings. It provides a simple interface for creating and managing video meetings powered by the 8x8 JaaS platform.

The meeting flow is simple:

• A "room" is created by an admin with a URL and password specific to that room.
• Anyone with the room password can start the meeting and join as moderator. The meeting can also be started from the admin dashboard.
• Everyone else can join with just the URL once the meeting has been started.

🤔 Why I built this

• 🔗 Want a system where people can join a call with only a URL in a browser. No app to install, no holding pen, no passwords.
• 👥 Multiple people can host the call if the original admin can’t show up.
• 🐢 On rare instances, the free Jitsi servers (what I had been using) get overloaded, which is inconvenient. The 8x8 JAAS service is more reliable.
• 📝 Use 8x8 transcribing service. Easy to summarize by pasting into Claude, but could automate this too.
• 🖥️ Can host it on any small server that can run a Go app. 8x8 does the heavy lifting videoconferencing in an iframe.
• 🔐 I control the authentication, storing recordings/transcriptions, etc.

✨ Features

• Meeting URL generation — create shareable meeting links with custom slugs
• No login required — guests can join meetings without creating an account
• Recording — record meetings; download links delivered via webhook
• Transcription — enable per-room transcription; view parsed transcripts in the admin panel
• Phone dial-in — allow participants to join via phone call (provided by 8x8, no SIP configuration required)
• Self-update — jaas-app update checks GitHub Releases and replaces the binary in-place

📦 Install

Download the latest binary from GitHub Releases:

# Linux (x86_64)
curl -Lo jaas-app https://github.com/cbrake/jaas-app/releases/latest/download/jaas-app-$(curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/cbrake/jaas-app/releases/latest | grep tag_name | cut -d'"' -f4)-linux-x86_64
chmod +x jaas-app

To update an existing install:

jaas-app update

🚀 Getting Started

📋 Prerequisites

• A JaaS account and API key from 8x8

⚙️ Setup

Copy the example environment file and fill in your JaaS credentials:

cp .env.example .env

🔧 Configuration

Variable	Required	Default	Description
JAAS_APP_ID	Yes		Your JaaS application ID
JAAS_API_KEY_ID	Yes		Your JaaS API key ID (used as JWT kid header)
JAAS_API_KEY_PATH	Yes*		Path to RSA private key PEM file (PKCS8 or PKCS1)
JAAS_API_KEY	Yes*		RSA private key PEM contents, supplied inline
ADMIN_PASSWORD	Yes		Password to access the admin dashboard
SESSION_SECRET	Yes		Secret used to sign session cookies (HMAC-SHA256)
LISTEN_ADDR	No	:8370	TCP address the HTTP server binds to
DB_PATH	No	./jaas.db	Path to the SQLite database file

* Supply the JaaS private key either as a file (JAAS_API_KEY_PATH) or inline (JAAS_API_KEY). Inline is convenient on platforms whose only secret mechanism is environment variables. If both are set, JAAS_API_KEY wins.

🏠 Hosting

The application is a single static Go binary with templates and assets embedded, and it keeps all state in one SQLite file. That makes it a good fit for any host that offers a small amount of persistent disk, and a poor fit for serverless platforms with ephemeral or shared storage.

What a host needs to provide:

• One long-running process. Meeting state and webhook delivery both assume the process is up; there is no external queue or cache.
• A persistent writable directory for DB_PATH. SQLite cannot be shared across replicas, so run exactly one instance.
• HTTPS on a stable public hostname. JaaS posts recording and transcription webhooks to the app, and browsers require HTTPS for camera and microphone access.
• ~64 MB of RAM and a fraction of a CPU. The video itself flows directly between participants and 8x8; this application only serves pages and tokens.

Options

Option	Persistence	Effort	Notes
VPS with systemd (Hetzner, Linode, etc.)	Local disk	Low	The setup this repository ships; see below. Roughly $5/month.
Docker or Podman on a VPS	Named volume	Low	Use Dockerfile and deploy/docker-compose.yml. Pairs well with Caddy.
Fly.io	Fly volume	Low	See deploy/fly.toml.example. Keep min_machines_running = 1.
Render, Railway, Koyeb	Attached disk	Low	Point DB_PATH at the mounted disk and hold the service at a single instance.
Home server or Raspberry Pi	Local disk	Medium	Add a tunnel (Cloudflare Tunnel, Tailscale Funnel) so webhooks can reach it.
Kubernetes	ReadWriteOnce volume	Medium	A single-replica StatefulSet; Recreate rather than rolling updates.

Serverless function platforms (Lambda, Cloud Run with scale-to-zero, Vercel, Workers) are not recommended: the SQLite file does not survive instance recycling, and webhooks may arrive while no instance is warm.

VPS with systemd

deploy/jaas-app.service runs the binary as a dedicated jaas user out of /opt/jaas-app, and envsetup.sh provides a jaas_deploy helper that builds for linux/amd64, copies the files over, and restarts the service:

. envsetup.sh && jaas_deploy

Put a reverse proxy in front for TLS. With Caddy the whole configuration is:

mtg.example.com {
	reverse_proxy 127.0.0.1:8370
}

Docker

docker build -t jaas-app .
docker run -d --name jaas-app \
	-p 8370:8370 \
	-v jaas-data:/data \
	--env-file deploy/env \
	--restart unless-stopped \
	jaas-app

The image defaults to DB_PATH=/data/jaas.db and runs as a non-root user, so mount a volume at /data. deploy/docker-compose.yml does the same thing with Compose.

Note that jaas-app update replaces the binary in place, which suits the VPS install. On container hosts, deploy a new image instead.

Backups

The database holds rooms, host password hashes, recording links, and transcripts. Back it up with SQLite's online backup, which is safe to run while the service is up:

sqlite3 /opt/jaas-app/jaas.db ".backup '/var/backups/jaas-$(date +%F).db'"

Keep the JaaS private key and the values in the environment file backed up separately.

🔐 How It Works

• Admin logs in at /admin with the admin password to create/manage rooms and start meetings.
• Host receives a meeting link (/m/{slug}) and starts the meeting by entering the room's host password.
• Guests join with just the link — no account or password needed once a host has started the meeting.
• Phone dial-in is built into JaaS. Each room gets a phone number and PIN displayed on the join page — no extra setup required.
• Recordings are delivered via JaaS webhooks and shown in the admin dashboard with time-limited download links.
• Transcriptions can be enabled per-room; parsed transcripts are viewable in the admin panel.
• Self-update — run jaas-app update to check GitHub Releases and replace the binary in-place.

📖 Developer Documentation

See developers.md for architecture details: routes, data model, JWT generation, webhook handling, and meeting lifecycle.

🔒 Security

See security.md for a security audit of the application.

📚 Reference

• JaaS Console
• JaaS Onboarding Guide
• JaaS Developer Docs