Fix Jicofo Configuration Errors in Jitsi Meet

Jicofo is the component that breaks quietest. Prosody starts, nginx serves the page, the videobridge process is alive, and then everyone who joins a room sits watching their own video tile with nobody else in it. No error on screen. Nothing obviously red in systemctl status.

I have lost more hours to this than to any other part of a self-hosted Jitsi install. And almost every time, it came down to four values spread across two config files. Not a bug, not a version problem. A domain with the wrong prefix, or a JID that differs by one word between jicofo.conf and jvb.conf.

What a jicofo configuration error actually looks like

The frustrating part is that a jicofo configuration error rarely announces itself as one. It shows up as a symptom in the browser, three layers away from the file you need to edit. Here is the mapping I use to skip straight to the right config:

If you want the background on what each of these services actually does before you start editing, our breakdown of the Jitsi architecture covers the roles of Nginx, Jicofo, Prosody, and the videobridge. This article assumes you already know roughly what they are and just need the thing fixed.

Read the logs before you touch a config file

I mean it. The temptation is to start editing domains and restarting things, and that is how a 20 minute fix becomes an evening. Jicofo tells you what it is unhappy about, in plain language, in the first 40 lines after a restart.

# Restart, then immediately watch what it says
sudo systemctl restart jicofo
sudo journalctl -u jicofo -n 60 -f

# The log files, if you prefer tailing those
sudo tail -f /var/log/jitsi/jicofo.log
sudo tail -f /var/log/jitsi/jvb.log
sudo tail -f /var/log/prosody/prosody.log /var/log/prosody/prosody.err

Three greps answer most questions. The first tells you whether Jicofo ever reached Prosody, the second whether a bridge ever showed up, and the third whether Jicofo has given up on finding one:

grep -i "not-authorized\|SASLError\|Failed to connect" /var/log/jitsi/jicofo.log
grep -i "Added new videobridge" /var/log/jitsi/jicofo.log
grep -i "no operational bridges\|no bridge available" /var/log/jitsi/jicofo.log

That middle one is the diagnostic I reach for most. If Added new videobridge never appears in the log after a JVB restart, then no amount of poking at Jicofo will help you. The bridge is the thing that failed to arrive, and your problem is in jvb.conf.

jicofo {
  xmpp {
    client {
      enabled = true
      hostname = "localhost"
      port = 5222
      domain = "auth.meet.example.com"
      xmpp-domain = "meet.example.com"
      username = "focus"
      password = "YOUR_FOCUS_PASSWORD"
      conference-muc-jid = "conference.meet.example.com"
      client-proxy = "focus.meet.example.com"
      disable-certificate-verification = false
    }
  }
  bridge {
    brewery-jid = "JvbBrewery@internal.auth.meet.example.com"
  }
}

Failed to connect/login: SASLError using SCRAM-SHA-1: not-authorized

sudo prosodyctl register focus auth.meet.example.com YOUR_FOCUS_PASSWORD
sudo prosodyctl register jvb auth.meet.example.com YOUR_JVB_PASSWORD
sudo systemctl restart prosody jicofo jitsi-videobridge2

sudo chown -R prosody:prosody /var/lib/prosody
sudo systemctl restart prosody

There are no operational bridges
Can not invite participant, no bridge available

# These two must print the same JID
grep brewery-jid /etc/jitsi/jicofo/jicofo.conf
grep muc_jids /etc/jitsi/videobridge/jvb.conf

videobridge {
  apis {
    xmpp-client {
      configs {
        shard {
          hostname = "localhost"
          domain = "auth.meet.example.com"
          username = "jvb"
          password = "YOUR_JVB_PASSWORD"
          muc_jids = "JvbBrewery@internal.auth.meet.example.com"
          muc_nickname = "jvb-1"
        }
      }
    }
  }
  stats {
    enabled = true
    transports = [
      { type = "muc" }
    ]
  }
}

Prosody jitsi error patterns worth recognising

Prosody is usually the innocent party, but it is where the evidence lives. A standard package install gives you two virtual hosts and two MUC components, and every JID above has to line up with one of them:

# What a working setup looks like in /etc/prosody/conf.d/meet.example.com.cfg.lua
VirtualHost "meet.example.com"          -- your main domain, anonymous or token auth
VirtualHost "auth.meet.example.com"     -- internal_hashed, holds the focus and jvb accounts
Component "conference.meet.example.com" "muc"        -- where actual meetings live
Component "internal.auth.meet.example.com" "muc"     -- where JvbBrewery lives

Two Prosody-side failures come up often enough to name. Certificate errors, where jicofo.log shows a TLS alert against localhost: on a self-signed setup, either add the certificate to the Java truststore or set disable-certificate-verification = true in jicofo.conf. On a loopback connection to your own Prosody that second option is a reasonable trade, and it is what the Docker images do by default. Storage errors, covered above, where Prosody cannot write to /var/lib/prosody and no account you register actually persists.

One thing worth ruling out early: media problems that look like config problems. If Jicofo logs Added new videobridge, both participants appear, and there is still no audio or video, your XMPP layer is fine and you have a network path issue instead. That is a TURN question, and our guide on setting up a TURN server for Jitsi Meet covers it. Do not go back to editing jicofo.conf.

The 10-minute checklist

When someone hands me a broken Jitsi box, this is the order I work in. It finds the problem most of the time before I have opened an editor:

1. Restart in order: Prosody, Jicofo, videobridge. Some "errors" are just startup races.
2. journalctl -u jicofo -n 60. A parse error shows instantly, a SASL error after a beat.
3. Check the five domain prefixes in jicofo.conf against the table above.
4. Diff brewery-jid against muc_jids. They must match exactly.
5. Grep jicofo.log for Added new videobridge. No line means the bridge never arrived.
6. Confirm the focus and jvb accounts exist in Prosody, and that /var/lib/prosody is owned by prosody.
7. Confirm muc_nickname is unique if you run more than one bridge.
8. Only then start looking at the network, ports, and TURN.

If you are setting a server up from scratch rather than repairing one, the config comes out right the first time by following the platform guides: Jitsi Meet on AWS or Jitsi Meet on GCP. Adding recording later introduces a second brewery room with the same class of JID mismatch, and the Jibri setup guide covers that one. And if you fixed a config but the browser still serves the old behaviour, that is a caching artefact, not a config error: see resolving Jitsi cache issues after an upgrade.

The pattern behind all of this is that Jitsi's components fail politely. They log the problem once, at startup, and then sit there looking healthy. Get in the habit of restarting and reading the first 60 lines, and most of these stop being mysteries.

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