BigBlueButton REST API command-line client

This is a small but useful command-line client for controlling meetings and recordings on a BigBlueButton server or cluster directly via the REST API. It allows administrators to bypass front-end applications (e.g. greenlight or moodle) and directly access the backing BBB servers for administrative tasks, monitoring or testing.

Install

You can install bbbctl the usual way with pip install bbbctl into a virtual environment. Sine bbbctl has no dependencies, you can also manually install it by downloading the python script and placing it into a bin folder:

curl -L --create-dirs -o ~/.local/bin/bbbctl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/defnull/bbbctl/master/src/bbbctl.py 
chmod +x ~/.local/bin/bbbctl

Tip: If you have uv/uvx installed, you can use this tool directly via uvx bbbctl ....

Usage

If run directly on a BBB server with sufficient permissions, server URL and secret will be fetched from local BBB config files automatically.

# Only required for external BBB servers:
export BBBCTL_SERVER="bbb.example.com"   # or --server as a parameter
export BBBCTL_SECRET="..."               # or --secret as a parameter

# Check if your secret works:
bbbctl meeting list

Command overview

You can get detailed help and a list of all parameters with bbbctl -h or bbbctl <command> -h.

• meeting Create, list, join, inspect or end meetings
  • list List all meetings
  • info <meetingID> Show info about a meeting
  • create <meetingID> <title> Create a new meeting
  • join <meetingID> <displayName> Generate join links
  • end <meetingID> Forcefully end a meeting
  • chat <meetingID> <message> Send a chat message to a running meeting (BBB 3.0)
  • nuke Forcefully end ALL meetings (be careful)
• record Work with recordings
  • list List all recordings
  • info <recordID> Show info about a recording
  • publish <recordID> Publish an unpublished recording
  • unpublish <recordID> Unpublish (hide) recording
  • delete <recordID> Delete a recording (be careful)
• sign <action> <param*> Print a signed API URL

Output format

The default output format is a human readable plain text format. You can switch to a more compact version with --format=compact. Other formats that are better suited for scripted usage are also supported: json, jsonline or xml

Use BBBApiClient from Python

You can use the BBBApiClient class from Python, too. This thin wrapper around the BBB REST API can send signed API requests and return parsed XML ElementTree instances. Some convenience methods exist to get just the part of the XML you need.

from bbbctl import BBBApiClient

client = BBBApiClient(api="bbb.example.com", secret="***")

for meeting in client.getMeetings():
    print(meeting.findtext("./meetingID"), meeting.findtext("./meetingName"))

License

Copyright (c) 2020-2026, Marcel Hellkamp.

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.