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Configuration of roles in Licode

August 7, 2014 - Lynckia

In this post we will explain in detail how to configure our custom roles in our Licode’s service.

Erizo Controller now supports the definition of role as a set of permissions, and these permissions are already predefined in this component. A permission allows a user to perform an action on a resource. Below you can find a list of the current permissions:

• Publish: it allows a user to make a local stream public into the room. This stream can be used to send video, audio or data, and once published other users should be able to subscribe to it.
• Subscribe: it allows a user to receive a stream that has been previously published into the room. The stream can be also stored or can be received from external sources.
• Record: it allows a user to store publishing streams in a room, even if it only contains audio or video.

These permissions are fixed in the source code, we can not create new ones without changing the code. But we can create roles from them. For example, if we aim to create e-learning applications we could create a role for the teacher, who should be able to publish, subscribe and even record the stream. On the other hand, the student could only subscribe to other streams. In this case our application would have both roles. In this case we should configure our Licode’s installation with the next line:

config.roles = {
  "teacher":["publish", "subscribe", "record"],
  "student":["subscribe"]
};

Important update: the new format to specify roles is:

config.roles = {
  "teacher": {"publish": true, "subscribe": true, "record": true},
  "student": {"subscribe": true}
};

As said above we can edit the roles in the configuration file that we can find at licode/licode_config.js once installed.