Jitsi Meet username from URL?

kuchengrab · May 8, 2020, 10:04pm

Hello Jitsi community,
is there any way to insert a username directly when joining a room?
Something like … meet.jitsi.tld/room-name&username="example-user" would be neat.

Our use case is a conference, where participants are logged into the conference’s wordpress website from where they can join different Jitsi Meet rooms. It would be cool if it was possible to forward the participant’s username with a dynamically created link (like above) to the room.
I found this old thread but it didn’t help that much, ufortunately.

Thanks in advance for your help

PeterS · May 8, 2020, 10:18pm

This can be done with the JWT authentication.

github.com

jitsi/lib-jitsi-meet/blob/master/doc/tokens.md

JWT token authentication Prosody plugin
==================

This plugin implements Prosody authentication provider that verifies client connection based on JWT token described in [RFC7519].
It allows to use any external form of authentication with lib-jitsi-meet. Once your user authenticates you need to
generate the JWT token as described in the RFC and pass it to your client app. Once it connects with valid token is considered authenticated by jitsi-meet system.

During configuration you will need to provide the *application ID* that identifies the client and a *secret* shared by both server and JWT token generator. Like described in the RFC, secret is used to compute HMAC hash value which allows to authenticate generated token. There are many existing libraries which can be used to implement token generator. More info can be found here: [http://jwt.io/#libraries-io]

JWT token authentication currently works only with BOSH connections.

[RFC7519]: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7519
[http://jwt.io/#libraries-io]: http://jwt.io/#libraries-io

### Token structure

The following JWT claims are used in authentication token:
- 'iss' specifies *application ID* which identifies the client app connecting to the server. It should be negotiated with the service provider before generating the token.
- 'room' contains the name of the room for which the token has been allocated. This is *NOT* full MUC room address. Example assuming that we have full MUC 'conference1@muc.server.net' then 'conference1' should be used here.  Alternately, a '*' may be provided, allowing access to all rooms within the domain.
- 'exp' token expiration timestamp as defined in the RFC

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This JWT is added to the url. Outside of setting the name you could also set the avatar.
See below example for the JWT payload.

Maybe there’s some plugins for Wordpress to easily create JWT tokens…

{
  "context": {
    "user": {
      "avatar": "https:/gravatar.com/avatar/abc123",
      "name": "John Doe",
      "email": "jdoe@example.com",
      "id": "abcd:a1b2c3-d4e5f6-0abc1-23de-abcdef01fedcba"
    },
    "group": "a123-123-456-789"
  },
  "aud": "jitsi",
  "iss": "my_client",
  "sub": "meet.jit.si",
  "room": "*",
  "exp": 1500006923
}

kuchengrab · May 9, 2020, 12:06am

Thank you @PeterS for your fast reply and the tip with the plugin.
I’m not a developer so my question may be dumb, but here it goes:
For this solution to work, 1) the respective Jitsi Meet installation needs to have the plugin installed and 2) it needs to be coupled with my client app, i.e. in my case the Wordpress website, correct?
Would that imply that only people who are authenticated via the Wordpress site are allowed on the Jitsi server?
[What we would like is just that people have their username by default when joining a jitsi coversation (instead of being Fellow Jitsers) … but maybe it’s indeed harder to do than expected. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Thank you.

plokta · May 9, 2020, 6:27am

It is indeed possible to provide the displayname in the URL, not as parameter but in the URL fragment:

https://meet.jit.si/roomname#userInfo.displayName="username"

See this thread for more details.

kuchengrab · May 9, 2020, 11:09am

Thank you @plokta, that’s exactly what I was looking for! Very happy about this.

jlightfoot · May 28, 2020, 2:28pm

Is it possible to pass the displayname parameter when the conference is setup using the iframe API?