Server configurations

BigBlueButton has a configuration file called config.xml that contains a lot of information about the server and that allows it to be configured and customized. Your can find a lot of references to it at BigBlueButton's wiki.

Some of the configurations in the config.xml are available on BigbluebuttonRails to allow users to see them and change them when meetings are created. One example is the list of available layouts. The config.xml provides a list of layouts that will be available in the conference. Having this list, BigbluebuttonRails can show it in an interface and allow users to select the initial layout for a conference.

These configurations are fetched using an API call called getDefaultConfigXML and some of them are stored in the database by BigbluebuttonRails. This prevents a call to getDefaultConfigXML from being made whenever a user wants to see the list of layouts, for instance. Since the contents of the config.xml will change very rarely, it's certainly favorable to have this "cache".

The server configuration information stored in the database is automatically updated in the following cases:

• Periodically (every ~3h) by a resque worker that runs in background.
• Whenever a server is created, its configurations are automatically fetched.
• Whenever the URL, salt or version of a server is modified.
• Whenever a call to getDefaultConfigXML is made, the returning config.xml is used to update the server's configurations.
• When the rake task bigbluebutton_rails:server_configs:update is executed.

So you can see that the configurations will be updated in several cases, so hardly they will not match the configurations of the server.

There are cases when it's useful to force an update in these configurations. If the config.xml of your web conference server changed, for instance, and your web application that uses BigbluebuttonRails is idle, it will only detect the new config.xml when the background resque worker runs. This means that it can take up to 3 hours for it to be updated. However, it's very easy to force an update; a few options are:

• Run rake bigbluebutton_rails:server_configs:update.
• Change the URL of the server to something else (even if it's an invalid URL) and then change it back to the correct URL.
• Open a room that has custom configurations, which will trigger a call to getDefaultConfigXML.