A Weekend With reTURN

Starting on the path to WebRTC

After lots of discussions around WebRTC and still barely enough knowledge about how it works, Will In China and I decided to start with setting up a reTURN server. This seemed like a scary task — we were venturing into the unknown. (Spoiler Alert) It turns out it’s not that bad.

So, to set up and test a reTURN server we spun up a Digital Ocean droplet (Ubuntu 14.04) then had to do three things:

1. Set up SSL
2. Set up the reTURN server
3. Set up EasyRTC to test it out

It ends up being as easy as just following the below three scripts. There’s a couple `nano` commands so pay attention to the comments. You should be able to easily copy and paste what you need from them or your droplet info.

Set up SSL

To set up SSL we use LetsEncrypt.org — which is awesome by the way. Here’s the gist to do just that:

Set up reTURN

For reTURN, we followed directions available across multiple sites:

• reTURN Overview
• reTURN Developer Quickstart
• TURN Server Installation by Muaz Khan

Here’s the summary you actually want to follow — pay attention to the comments:

Set up EasyRTC

And finally setting up EasyRTC to test it all. This was the exciting bit where it all worked and we felt like we accomplished something.

Here are the main setup instructions we followed — EasyRTC server install.

Here’s how to set that up:

And that’s it! Grab a friend and link them to your droplet’s IP address at the EasyRTC port (8080 if you didn’t change it) and you can try out the demoes. You’ll be able to video chat and try all sorts of things. All by utilizing your reTURN server.

I hope you enjoyed that and would appreciate your feedback. Let me know what you think!