Coturn for WebRTC NAT Traversal

IMPORTANT! This feature has been replaced by Jitsi integration instead.

This article will show you how to set up Coturn. This is a service that allows hosts behind NAT to communicate peer to peer with webrtc. STUN is helping to negotiate port/ip and TURN will proxy the actual traffic if all else fails.

We're using this with Convos' video IRC feature, but the same applies to other WebRTC projects.

Installation

I'll be assuming you're on Ubutunu for this tutorial, so users on other distros will have to adjust the setup for their environment. First we'll install the actual ubuntu package. If you don't already have it, you will also need letsencrypt to generate valid ssl certs.

apt-install coturn certbot

Then we edit /etc/turnserver.conf - It should look roughly like this:

listening-port=3478
tls-listening-port=5349

listening-ip=
relay-ip=
external-ip=

realm=example.org
server-name=coturn.example.org

fingerprint
lt-cred-mech

user username:s3cret

cert=/etc/letsencrypt/live/coturn.example.org/fullchain.pem
pkey=/etc/letsencrypt/live/coturn.example.org/privkey.pem
cipher-list="ECDH+AESGCM:ECDH+CHACHA20:DH+AESGCM:ECDH+AES256:DH+AES256:ECDH+AES128:DH+AES:RSA+AESGCM:RSA+AES:!aNULL:!MD5:!DSS"

Set up letsencrypt

$ sudo certbot certonly --standalone --preferred-challenges http \
    --deploy-hook "systemctl restart coturn" \
    -d coturn.example.com

certbort will automatically set up renewal of the certificate

Now let's enable the service. Add TURNSERVER_ENABLED=1 to /etc/default/coturn and then run systemctl start coturn.

Convos configuration

To use such a server with Convos, it requires a couple of environment variables to be set:

Environment=CONVOS_STUN=stun://user:[email protected]:5349
Environment=CONVOS_TURN=turn://user:[email protected]:5349

(Assuming you run Convos under systemd)

Remember to systemctl daemon-reload and restart after updating the service :)

If you're running Convos a different way like under Docker, adjust the relevant settings.