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, right after installing Opencast on your machine.

All settings are made to files, residing in the Opencast configuration directory. In most cases, that should be either /etc/opencast/custom.properties or /opt/opencast/etc/custom.properties. Edit the files, using the editor of your choice, e.g.:

vim /etc/opencast/custom.properties

Step 1: Setting the Server URL

By default, only connections from the local machine are accepted by Opencast. You want to change this if the system should be accessible within a network.

First, find the property org.opencastproject.server.url in your custom.properties configuration file and set it to your own domain name:

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

Note: This value will be written to all generated mediapackages and thus cannot be changed easily for already processed media. At least not without an extra amount of work involving modifications to the database. That is why you should think about this setting carefully.

Second, adjust the binding address in org.ops4j.pax.web.cfg. The binding address can be set to 0.0.0.0 for general network access. The property to modify is:

org.ops4j.pax.web.listening.addresses=127.0.0.1

It may be necessary to adjust the jetty http connector idleTimeout value for processing large files in some configurations. To do so, uncomment this line in org.ops4j.pax.web.cfg:

org.ops4j.pax.web.config.file=${karaf.etc}/jetty-opencast.xml

and modify the host and if necessary port values in jetty-opencast.xml to match the ops4j configuration:

<Set name="host">127.0.0.1</Set>

Step 2: Setting the Login Details

There are two authentication methods for Opencast. HTTP Digest authentication 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.
  • org.opencastproject.security.admin.pass
    • The password for the administrative account. This is set to opencast by default.
  • org.opencastproject.security.digest.user
    • The user for the communication between Opencast nodes, as well as for capture agents. This is set to opencast_system_account by default.
  • org.opencastproject.security.digest.pass
    • The password for the communication between Opencast nodes and capture agents. 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 Opencast nodes (Core, Worker, Capture Agent, …)

Step 3: Change the default shutdown command

Karaf provides a socket over wich you can send a shutdown command. The socket does not provide any kind of authentication. Therefore anyone who obtains write access to this socket is able to shutdown karaf and everything that runs on it. There is a default karaf.shutdown.command defined in custom.properties. Change this to something secret.

Step 4: Setting up Apache ActiveMQ Message Broker

Since version 2.0, Opencast requires a running Apache ActiveMQ instance with a 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 5: Database Configuration

Opencast uses an integrated HSQL database by default. While you will find it perfectly functional, it has certain drawbacks:

  • It is rather slow
  • It cannot be used for distributed set-ups
  • Upgrading Opencast with this database is not possible

For testing, it is totally fine to keep the internal database, but 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.

Step 6: 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, an NFS mount is used for this. You can set the directory by changing org.opencastproject.storage.dir like:

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

Please keep in mind that the user running Opencast must have read/write permissions to the storage directory.