Note

We have updated the Mattermost plugin. Only versions 2.1.0 and above will work with the default BigBlueButton server credentials.

Older versions will, however, continue to work when configured with your own BigBlueButton server.

BigBlueButton Plugin for Mattermost

BigBlueButton is an open source web conferencing system for online learning. Teams can create, join and manage their BigBlueButton meetings from inside Mattermost.

Jump to:

• Installation and Setup
• Usage
• Contributing

Want to see how the BigBlueButton integration with Mattermost works? Checkout the video below.

Installation and Setup

1. Go to: https://github.com/blindsidenetworks/mattermost-plugin-bigbluebutton/releases

2. Download the tar.gz file corresponding to your server platform. You do not need to extract the tar file once you download it.

3. Inside Mattermost, go to System Console > Integrations > Integration Management. Make sure the following are turned to true:

   • Enable Incoming Webhooks
   • Enable Outgoing Webhooks
   • Enable Custom Slash Commands
   • Enable integrations to override usernames
   • Enable integrations to override profile picture icons

4. Next you must enable Plugins. Go to System Console > Plugin Management > Configuration and set Enable Plugins to true. Depending on your Mattermost version, an additional step may be required to enable uploading plugins in your Mattermost config.json file:

   • vi /opt/mattermost/config/config.json
   • Under PluginSettings, make sure Enable and Enable Uploads are both set to true
   • Restart your Mattermost with sudo systemctl restart mattermost assuming you used systemd for Mattermost services

5. Go to System Console > Plugins > Management and upload your bigbluebutton_<arch>_amd64.tar.gz. The BigBlueButton Plugin should appear under Installed Plugins.

6. Before activating the plugin, you must configure the plugin settings. By default, you are given a BigBlueButton test server to try it out. However, you have options. Like Mattermost, BigBlueButton is open source. You are (more than) welcome to setup your own BigBlueButton server. If you do, the command sudo bbb-conf --secret will print out the server's URL and secret key for configuration with Mattermost. Alternatively, you can contact Blindside Networks for hosting options.

   

7. Next, go back to System Console > Plugins > Management and Activate the plugin.

Usage

Create a BigBlueButton meeting in any channel

You can create a meeting that all channel participants can join.

Clicking the Join Meeting button immediately loads the BigBlueButton HTML5 client.

Plugin provides live meeting details during and after the meeting has ended

After the meeting ends, you see the Date, Meeting Length, and Attendees.

You can search for past BigBlueButton recordings

Using the drop-down menu you can easily search a channel for all past recordings.

Directly meeting with any user

You can click on any user's name and choose Start BigBlueButton Meeting.

When you invite a user to a meeting, they will get a pop-up notification to Join Meeting.

You can type /bbb in any channel to create a meeting. When

Setting up your own BigBlueButton server

Using the bbb-install.sh script you can setup your own BigBlueButton server in about 15 minutes. If your interested in going through the steps in detail, see BigBlueButton install guide.

Contributing

Plugin is written in Golang for server side and Javascript and React for client side. Use make build to build the plugin. You can also use make quickbuild following first build for faster builds. The dependencies are managed with Glide for Go and NPM for javascript.

The plugin should be placed in a directory such as ~/go/src/github.com/blindsidenetworks/mattermost-plugin-bigbluebutton

To download a local version: mkdir -p ~/go/src/github.com/blindsidenetworks and git clone https://github.com/blindsidenetworks/mattermost-plugin-bigbluebutton.git

Mattermost plugin development guides available here: https://developers.mattermost.com/extend/plugins/

BigBlueButton API available here: http://docs.bigbluebutton.org/dev/api.html