Galène

Galène is a video conferencing server written in Go by Juliusz Chroboczek, a networking researcher at IRIF in Paris. It ships as a single binary with no runtime dependencies. To run it, you copy the binary to a server, optionally configure a JSON file for rooms and passwords, and start it. There is no package manager, no Docker required, no database to configure, and no systemd unit files to write unless you want them.

The design philosophy is deliberate minimalism. Galène handles WebRTC-based group video and audio — participants join a room via a browser, see each other, and talk. It does this on hardware requirements that larger platforms cannot match. A low-end VPS or a Raspberry Pi can serve a small group meeting without the memory and CPU pressure that Jitsi Meet imposes.

The target audience is organisations that need a private, self-hosted video room without the operational overhead of a production-grade conferencing platform. Academic groups, small teams, clubs, and community organisations that run occasional meetings are the natural fit. The lack of recording, persistent rooms, and administrative tooling is a real constraint for teams that need those features — but for the use case of “a private video room that works when we need it,” Galène delivers cleanly.

Room configuration is done through JSON files. You define room names, passwords, and participant permissions without a web UI. This keeps the attack surface small and the deployment simple, but it requires a degree of comfort with text-based configuration that a dashboard-based tool does not.

HTTPS is required for WebRTC in browsers, so a TLS-terminating reverse proxy like Nginx or Caddy is a practical necessity alongside the binary.

Galène: Pros & Cons