bbbot-ruby

Ruby wrapper for bbbot.

bbbot is a command-line java application that simulates a real client for BigBlueButton, and this gem allows this java application to be started from within a ruby application. You can just start/stop the bot and configure the initialization parameters. It’s not possible to interact with the bot.

It uses bigbluebutton-api-ruby to query the BBB server.

Where is it used?

Mainly in the integration tests for these two gems: bigbluebutton-api-ruby and bigbluebutton_rails.

Some more information

A meeting in BigBlueButton (BBB) will only be running after the first user establishes a RTMP connection with the server. To establish this connection, this gem uses bbbot, a java application implemented with the same base libraries used in the BigBlueButton Android client. This bot is still in early stages of development, but it can already properly join a meeting.

So, to use this gem your BBB server needs support to the mobile client. In BBB 0.8 the support is already available in a standard installation, you just need to set the pass the mobile_salt when a BigBlueButtonBot is instantiated. For earlier versions of BigBlueButton you need to install it manually (it’s very simple). See: code.google.com/p/mconf/wiki/MconfMobile for more information.

Usage example

The java application that creates the bots is called when you instantiate a BigBlueButtonBot. The meeting that the bot will join must be already created.

api = BigBlueButton::BigBlueButtonApi.new("http://server.com/bigbluebutton/api", "my-secret-salt", "0.8")
BigBlueButtonBot.new(api, "meeting-id", "03b07", 2, 60)

And to stop the bots (it sends a SIGTERM signal to the processes):

BigBlueButtonBot.finalize

Print debug information

By default the bot will not print any information to stdout. To do so, set the environment variable DEBUG when running your application.

So, for instance, if you’re calling bbbot-ruby inside a script called run-bot.rb, you should run it with:

ruby run-bot.rb DEBUG=1