Daniel Nashed's Blog

ST 11.5 Meetings Preview on Docker

ST Meetings is finally available as a preview. I looked into the installation and with some minor tweaks and tips you should get it working.

Once you know how it works a Docker setup has really some advantages.

The documentation hopefully evolves over time https://help.hcltechsw.com/sametime/11.0.2/admin/t_deployment_docker.html

Let me give you some feedback from what I just did. It's not a complete installation instruction.
Just my side notes to complement the documentation and it could help when troubleshooting.

Once you know how it works it just needs a couple of minutes to be up and running.
(It's a test environment with a default cert for now)



Environment

I used a SLES 15 SP server as a Docker host and also installed Domino 11.0.1 FP1 along with Sametime 11.0.2.
So I have ST Community server, ST Proxy native on Linux and the ST Meetings server on Docker.


Docker CE 19 Version

First of all you should note that you have to use a recent Docker version. I would personally never install anything earlier than Docker CE 18.
SLES 15 SP2 comes with Docker CE 19 out of the box. But CentOS 7.x comes with a very very old Docker version which will not work!

Depending on how you setup CentOS 8.x you will end up with an up to date installed Podman instance which is sort of Docker compatible. But will not work for what we need.

So you really have to install Docker using their official repro --> https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/centos/
I would stay with CentOS 7, because the containerd version in CentOS 9 does not allow you to install Docker CE 19.x. But  Docker CE 18.x should also work if you want CentOS 8.x
While testing I did SLES and CentOS installation in parallel. Both finally worked.

The important part is to get all the host names and ports configured in the right way.
I have not looked into replacing the certs -- I have not seen if ST Meetings supports Let's Encrypt like the underlying Jitsi server does.


Install Docker Compose

Docker Compose does not come with Docker CE. You have to install it separately.
And it will be used to bring up all the container using the docker-compose.yml file which holds a description of all the containers and the network.

Here is how you can install it --> https://docs.docker.com/compose/install/


ST Meeting Server

The installation comes with the Docker images and installation scripts.

Before you start you really have to look into the custom.env file which is all you need to customize!
There is a .env file which is used by docker-compose. And the docker compose file leverages variables defined in both files.

Along with that the configuration is written into the jitsi-config directory.
This is important information, because if your setup was wrong, you will need o remove the directory to get the configuration reset.

The first installation will also create the JWT_APP_SECRET which you have to copy to your ST proxy and ST community server as outlined in the documentation.
If you have made that configuration, you should pass the base64 encoded value when the install.sh script asks for it.

In my case I had to redo the configuration a couple of times and look into the logs (so pasting the existing secret was helpful).

Also looking into the logs of the container might be helpful.

This command for example gets you the logs from the nginx container which you might need for troubleshooting (helped in my case).

docker-compose logs -f nginx

But if things go right you just run the install.sh script which will

- upload all the Docker images to your docker host
- write the configuration
- use docker-compose up to create all the containers needed

The configuration is local on your Docker host and mounted into the container as a volume.

If you have to stop and remove all the containers you can just use

docker-compose down

This makes it easy if you need to review/update the config and start again.

I hope this helps as a jump-start... The DNUG communications group will look into it for our own server. And that context we might come up with more details.

-- Daniel

• Comments [3]