Basic Configuration

This guide will help you to change the basic configuration settings which are required or at least strongly recommended for each Opencast installation. This is basically what you should do directly after you installed Opencast on your machine.

All these settings are made in the config.properties file. It can be found directly in you Opencast configuration directory. In most cases, that should be either /etc/matterhorn/config.properties or /opt/matterhorn/etc/config.properties. Open this file using the editor of your choice, e.g.:

vim /etc/matterhorn/config.properties

Step 1: Setting the Server URL

The first thing you should do is to set the server URL. To do that, find the property org.opencastproject.server.url in your config.properties configuration file. This key is set to http://localhost:8080 by default. That will only allow access from the local machine. You should change this if your server should be accessible within a network. Set it to your domain name or IP address like:

org.opencastproject.server.url=http://example.com:8080

Note: This value will be written to all generated mediapackages and thus cannot be changed for already generated media afterwards. At least not without an extra amount of work involving modifications to the database. So think about this setting for a minute.

Step 2: Setting the Login Details

There are two authentication methods for Opencast. HTTP Digest authntication and form-based authentication. Both methods need a username and a password. Change the password for both! The important keys for this are:

  • org.opencastproject.security.admin.user: The user for the administrative account. This is set to “admin” by default. You should definitely change the credentials if your server is reachable from the internet.
  • org.opencastproject.security.admin.pass: The password for the administrative account. This is set to “opencast” by default. You should definitely change the credentials if your server is reachable from the internet.
  • org.opencastproject.security.digest.user: The user for the communication between Opencast nodes. This is set to “matterhorn_system_account” by default.
  • org.opencastproject.security.digest.pass: The password for the communication between Opencast nodes. This is set to “CHANGE_ME” by default.

Note: The Digest credentials are also used for internal communication of Opencast servers. So these keys have to be set to the same value on each of you Matterhon nodes (Core, Worker, Capture Agent, …)

Step 3: Setting up Apache ActiveMQ Message Broker

Since version 2.0, Opencast requires a running Apache ActiveMQ instance with specific configuration. The message broker is mostly run on the admin server of Opencast but can be run separately. It needs to be started before Opencast. For more details about the setup, have a look at the Apache ActiveMQ configuration guide.

Step 4: Setting the Storage Directory (optional)

Even though it is not important for all systems – on test setups you can probably omit this – you will often want to set the storage directory. This directory is used to store all media, metadata, … Often, a NFS mount is used for this. You can set the directory by changing org.opencastproject.storage.dir like:

org.opencastproject.storage.dir=/media/mhdatamount

Step 5: Database Configuration (optional)

Opencast uses an integrated HSQL database by default. While you will find it perfectly functional, it is rather slow. So you are highly encouraged to switch to a stand-alone database for productional use. For more information about database configuration, have a look at the Database Configuration section.