Galene (or Galène) is a videoconference server (an “SFU”) that is easy to deploy and that requires very moderate server resources. It was originally designed for lectures, conferences and student tutorials, but later turned out to be useful for traditional meetings. Galene has been used in production at two major universities (Université de Paris and Sorbonne Université) for lectures, practicals, seminars, and for staff meetings. It has been used to host a number of conferences (including SOCS’2020, JFLA’2021 and LibrePlanet 2024).
Galene’s server side is implemented in Go, and uses the Pion implementation of WebRTC. The server is portable: it is tested on Linux/amd64 and Linux/arm64, and also runs on Linux/armv7, Linux/mips (OpenWRT), Mac OS X, and Windows. The default client is implemented in Javascript, and works on recent versions of all major web browsers, both on desktop and mobile (but see the FAQ for caveats with specific browsers).
While traffic is encrypted and authenticated from sender to server and again from server to receiver, Galene does not perform end-to-end encryption: anyone who controls the server might, in principle, be able to access the data being exchanged. For best privacy, you should install your own server (either manually or through Yunohost).
Galene’s is not the only self-hosted WebRTC server. High-quality alternatives include Janus and Jitsi.
Galene is free and open source software, subject to the MIT licence. Galene’s development was previously supported by Nexedi, and is currently being supported by NLNet’s NGI0Core program.