Multi Tenancy Configuration

Introduction

A single Opencast instance can handle multiple tenants, each of which have their own recordings in the system. Opencast refers to tenants as organizations, and an HTTP request to the Opencast installation is mapped to an organization using the server name. Therefore, a Opencast instance will usually be set up with multiple DNS names pointing to the same IP, for example:

should all resolve to the same IP.

A tenant configuration thus consists mainly of the DNS name that is mapped to that tenant.

Default Setup

Out of the box, Opencast has one tenant configured, called mh_default_org that is mapped to the server name localhost:8080. As long as there is one tenant configuration only, Opencast will map every request to that tenant regardless of the server name. As soon as a second tenant configuration is available, requests will be mapped to organizations using the server name, and an HTTP status code 404 will be returned for requests that hit the Opencast installation that cannot be mapped to any organization.

Limitations

Multi tenancy in Opencast is working, however it is not fully finished. Certain objects are still shared amongst organizations.

Adding A Tenant

To add a tenant to the installation, two things need to be put in place: a tenant configuration and a set of security rules. For this example we have a three node install of admin.example.org, worker.example.org, and presentation.example.org. Assume that the new tenant is called tenant1 and should be mapped to tenant1-*.example.org.

Step 1: Tenant Configuration

Create a file called org.opencastproject.organization-tenant1.cfg in the etc/ directory of your Opencast installation, on each of the nodes. As an example, this is what the admin node looks like:

id=tenant1
name=Tenant 1
admin_role=ROLE_ADMIN
anonymous_role=ROLE_ANONYMOUS

# Hostname URL mapping
prop.org.opencastproject.host.admin.example.org=https://tenant1-admin.example.org
prop.org.opencastproject.host.presentation.example.org=https://tenant1-presentation.example.org
prop.org.opencastproject.host.worker.example.org=https://tenant1-worker.example.org:8443

# Admin and Presentation Server Urls
prop.org.opencastproject.admin.ui.url=https://tenant1-admin.example.org
prop.org.opencastproject.engage.ui.url=https://tenant1-presentation.example.org

# Default properties for the user interface
prop.logo_mediamodule=/engage/ui/img/logo/opencast-icon.svg
prop.logo_player=/engage/ui/img/logo/opencast.svg

There are more options available than in this example. The easiest way of creating that file is probably to create a copy of the already existing org.opencastproject.organization-mh_default_org.cfg.

Note, the default organization file org.opencastproject.organization-mh_default_org.org must refer to the actual server names:

prop.org.opencastproject.host.admin.example.org=https://admin.example.org
prop.org.opencastproject.host.presentation.example.org=https://presentation.example.org
prop.org.opencastproject.host.worker.example.org=https://worker.example.org:8443

This file sets the default organization that is selected. This is currently required because some Opencast components do not support multitenancy.

Hosts can have different schemas (http / https) and port numbers, e.g. when you run behind proxy server. Note, that the combination of hostname and port number is uniquely mapped to an organization.

It is not supported for Opencast tenants to be hosted in a subpath. Opencast tenants needs to be served from the root path element. The RFC 3986 URI path component needs to be empty.

Step 2: Security Configuration

Create a file called tenant1.xml in /etc/security. This file specifies access rules for individual URLs that specify which roles are needed in order to access a given URL. In addition, it allows to define the directory services that are used to authenticate users. The file follows the standard ways on configuring Spring Security and you are free to add anything that can go into a Spring Security configuration.

The easiest way of creating that file is probably to create a copy of the already existing mh_default_org.xml.

Step 3: Other Configuration

Two additional files should be copied: org.opencastproject.ui.metadata.CatalogUIAdapterFactory-episode-common.cfg should be copied to org.opencastproject.ui.metadata.CatalogUIAdapterFactory-episode-common-tenant1.cfg, and org.opencastproject.ui.metadata.CatalogUIAdapterFactory-series-common.cfg should be copied to org.opencastproject.ui.metadata.CatalogUIAdapterFactory-series-common-tenant1.cfg.

In each of the new configuration files, change organization key to match the tenant id, and change the common-metadata key to false. Create a copy of the files for each tenant. Note: The original ...-common.cfg files must have their common-metadata keys set to true, otherwise metadata will only be available in one tenant and you will experience a number of odd errors.