All HowTo's Linux Redhat, Fedora and CentOS Linux

Installing Janus on Redhat Enterprise Linux

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

3 comments

  1. It turns out that this HowTo isn’t sufficient. The Dev’s using Janus weren’t satisfied with the results and ended up going to the “official” Janus support people. Their prices aren’t too bad. They use Ubutnu, not CentOS. Good luck.

  2. After running this
    ./configure –prefix=/opt/janus

    getting this error
    checking pkg-config is at least version 0.9.0… yes
    checking for JANUS… no
    configure: error: Package requirements (
    glib-2.0 >= 2.34
    libconfig
    nice
    jansson >= 2.5
    libssl >= 1.0.1
    libcrypto
    zlib
    ) were not met:

    No package ‘libconfig’ found

    Consider adjusting the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable if you
    installed software in a non-standard prefix.

    Alternatively, you may set the environment variables JANUS_CFLAGS
    and JANUS_LIBS to avoid the need to call pkg-config.
    See the pkg-config man page for more details.

    libconfig is already installed.

Leave a Reply to Andrew Galdes Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *