This article discusses the installation of Janus on a Redhat Enterprise Linux 7 server. The installation process is long and complicated due to the dependencies required for Janus and their lack of inclusion in Yum repositories.
The steps below require come code compiling. The process is simple but may be scary for those who’ve never done it. Compiling code has a side effect hindering the use of Yum. Yum (as a system) only knows about packages installed with yum (and rpm) and therefore cannot see what you’ve compiled and installed manually.
The reason i’ve documented this process is because it was difficult. A client requested that we install Janus on their application server which runs Redhat Enterprise Linux 7. In hindsight i would recommend a dedicated Ubuntu server for this role (the media server, not the web sever).
Janus is a WebRTC server described as “Janus is an open source, general purpose, WebRTC server designed and developed by [Meetecho](http://www.meetecho.com). This version of the server is tailored for Linux systems, although it can be compiled for, and installed on, MacOS machines as well. Windows is not supported, but if that’s a requirement, Janus is known to work in the “Windows Subsystem for Linux” on Windows 10.”
I strongly recommend taking a backup of the system before following the steps in this article. Even better would be to do this on a test system and then on a production system (still with backups or a snapshot that can be reverted to). I’ve sourced CentOS packages to fill the gaps in what Redhat doesn’t supply.
TIP: This biggest sticking point for me was the “libsrtp, libsrtp-devel” software. See below for the section on installing them. It was a matter of doing things in the right order. If what i’ve done doesn’t work for you, try in different ways with different commands such as “yum” versus “rpm -ihv” versus “rpm -Uhv”.
It helps to have EPEL configured.
yum install epel-release
Install as much as possible using the following Yum command. Several of the packages listed in the command below wont be found.
yum install libmicrohttpd-devel jansson-devel \ openssl-devel libsrtp-devel sofia-sip-devel glib-devel \ opus-devel libogg-devel libcurl-devel lua-devel \ pkgconfig gengetopt libtool autoconf automake coreutils \ glib2-devel openssl098e
Throughout this process i have sourced dependencies from “https://pkgs.org/”. The versions that i’ve noted below will obviously change over time so consider the date of this article and the versions available.
The documentation at “https://janus.conf.meetecho.com/docs/README.html” gives guidance on the installation process but not specific to Redhat (or CentOS, etc) and includes content not included here. Consider reading that article if you get stuck.
The following sections start with the name of the dependencies being installed (in bold).
Packages: libmicrohttpd, libmicrohttpd-devel wget http://mirror.centos.org/centos/7/os/x86_64/Packages/libmicrohttpd-0.9.33-2.el7.x86_64.rpm wget http://mirror.centos.org/centos/7/os/x86_64/Packages/libmicrohttpd-devel-0.9.33-2.el7.x86_64.rpm rpm -ihv libmicrohttpd-0.9.33-2.el7.x86_64.rpm rpm -ihv libmicrohttpd-devel-0.9.33-2.el7.x86_64.rpm
Package: libnice wget http://mirror.centos.org/centos/7/os/x86_64/Packages/libnice-devel-0.1.3-4.el7.x86_64.rpm rpm -ihv libnice-devel
Packages: jansson, jansson-devel wget http://mirror.centos.org/centos/7/os/x86_64/Packages/jansson-2.10-1.el7.x86_64.rpm wget http://mirror.centos.org/centos/7/os/x86_64/Packages/jansson-devel-2.10-1.el7.x86_64.rpm rpm -Uhv jansson-2.10-1.el7.x86_64.rpm rpm -ihv jansson-devel-2.10-1.el7.x86_64.rpm
Packages: libsrtp, libsrtp-devel yum remove gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free wget http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/Packages/l/libsrtp-devel.1.5.4-3.el6.x86_64.rpm wget http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/Packages/l/libsrtp-1.5.4-3.el6.x86_64.rpm rpm -Uhv libsrtp-1.5.4-3.el6.x86_64.rpm libsrtp-devel-1.5.4-3.el6.x86_64.rpm yum install cheese empathy farstream02 telepathy-farstream totem totem-nautilus
Package: sofia-sip-devel wget -O sofia-sip-1.12.11.tar.gz https://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/sofia-sip/sofia-sip/1.12.11/sofia-sip-1.12.11.tar.gz?r=https%3A%2F%2Fsourceforge.net%2Fprojects%2Fsofia-sip%2Ffiles%2Flatest%2Fdownload&ts=1540078563 tar -xzf sofia-sip-1.12.11.tar.gz cd sofia-sip-1.12.11 ./configure; make; make install
Package: opus-devel wget http://mirror.centos.org/centos/7/os/x86_64/Packages/opus-devel-1.0.2-6.el7.x86_64.rpm rpm -ihv opus-devel-1.0.2-6.el7.x86_64.rpm
Package: libogg-devel wget http://mirror.centos.org/centos/7/os/x86_64/Packages/libogg-devel-1.3.0-7.el7.x86_64.rpm rpm -ihv libogg-devel-1.3.0-7.el7.x86_64.rpm
Package: lua-devel wget http://mirror.centos.org/centos/7/os/x86_64/Packages/lua-devel-5.1.4-15.el7.x86_64.rpm rpm -ihv lua-devel-5.1.4-15.el7.x86_64.rpm
Janus: git clone https://github.com/meetecho/janus-gateway.git cd janus-gateway sh autogen.sh
The final step is to compile Janus. This step will end either in success of an explanation of anything missing that you’ll need to install manually.
./configure --prefix=/opt/janus make make install
Now you should be able to go into “/opt/janus” and run the following command:
janus -V