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Developer Guide for Jitsi Meet

This guide will help you setup a development environment to start working on the Jitsi Meet mobile app itself.

caution

Building the apps / SDKs is not supported on Windows.

Overview​

note

This guide is about building the Jitsi Meet apps themselves. If you want to integrate the Jitsi Meet SDK into your own application check the dedicated page on the sidebar.

Jitsi Meet can be built as a standalone app for Android or iOS. It uses the React Native framework.

First make sure the React Native dependencies (React Native CLI Quickstart) are installed.

Node version

Node 16.x and npm 8.x are required. Any other version may result in runtime errors.

Xcode

Xcode 12 or higher is required.

iOS​

  1. Install dependencies

  • Install main dependencies:

    npm install

  • Install the required pods (CocoaPods must be installed first, it can be done with Homebrew: brew install cocoapods)

    cd ios
    pod install
    cd ..

  1. Build the app using Xcode

    • Open ios/jitsi-meet.xcworkspace in Xcode. Make sure it's the workspace file!

    • Select your device from the top bar and hit the Play ▶️ button.

    When the app is launched from Xcode, the Debug Console will show the application output logs.

  2. Other remarks

    It's likely you'll need to change the bundle ID for deploying to a device. This can be changed in the General tab. Under Identity set Bundle Identifier to a different value, and adjust the Team in the Signing section to match your own.

Android​

The React Native dependencies page has very detailed information on how to setup Android Studio and the required components for getting the necessary build environment. Make sure you follow it closely.

Set the JDK in Android Studio to at least Java 11: https://developer.android.com/studio/intro/studio-config#jdk

The recommended way for building Jitsi Meet is building the app with Android Studio.

Adding extra dependencies​

Due to how our project is structured, React Native's automatic linking won't work so Android dependencies need to be manually linked.

First, add your project to android/settings.gradle like so:

android/settings.gradle
include ':react-native-mydependency'
project(':react-native-mydependency').projectDir = new File(rootProject.projectDir, '../node_modules/@somenamespace/react-native-mydependency/android')

Then add a dependency on android/sdk/build.gradle like so:

android/sdk/build.gradle
implementation project(':react-native-mydependency')

Last, link it in the getReactNativePackages method in android/sdk/src/main/java/org/jitsi/meet/sdk/ReactInstanceManagerHolder.java like so:

android/sdk/src/main/java/org/jitsi/meet/sdk/ReactInstanceManagerHolder.java
new com.companyname.library.AwesomeLibraryPackage(),

Make sure you adjust the fully qualified package name.

Debugging​

The official documentation on debugging is quite extensive and specifies the preferred method for debugging.

note

When using Chrome Developer Tools for debugging the JavaScript source code is being interpreted by Chrome's V8 engine, instead of JSCore which React Native uses. It's important to keep this in mind due to potential differences in supported JavaScript features.

Enabling extra features​