Supysonic

Supysonic is a Python implementation of the Subsonic server API.

Current supported features are:

• browsing (by folders or tags)
• streaming of various audio file formats
• transcoding
• user or random playlists
• cover arts (as image files in the same folder as music files)
• starred tracks/albums and ratings
• Last.FM scrobbling
• Jukebox mode

Supysonic currently targets the version 1.9.0 of the Subsonic API. For more details, go check the API implementation status.

Table of contents

• Installation
  • Prerequisites
  • Database initialization
  • Configuration
• Running the application
  • As a standalone debug server
  • As an Apache WSGI application
  • Other options
  • Docker
• Quickstart
• Running the daemon
• Upgrading

Installation

Supysonic can run as a standalone application (not recommended for a "production" server) or as a WSGI application (on Apache for instance).

To install it, either run:

$ python setup.py install

or

$ pip install .

but not both.

Prerequisites

You'll need these to run Supysonic:

• Python >= 3.5
• Flask
• PonyORM
• Python Imaging Library
• requests
• mutagen
• watchdog
• zipstream

All the dependencies will automatically be installed by the installation command above.

You may also need a database specific package if you don't want to use SQLite (the default):

• MySQL: pip install pymysql or pip install mysqlclient
• PostgreSQL: pip install psycopg2-binary

Database initialization

Supysonic needs a database to run. It can either be a SQLite, MySQL-compatible or PostgreSQL database.

Please refer to the documentation of the DBMS you've chosen on how to create a database. Once it has a database, Supysonic will automatically create the tables it needs.

If you want to use PostgreSQL you'll have to add the citext extension to the database once created. This can be done when connected to the database as the superuser with the folowing SQL command:

supysonic=# CREATE EXTENSION citext;

If you absolutely have no clue about databases, you can go with SQLite as it doesn't need any setup other than specifying a path for the database. Note that using SQLite for large libraries might not be the brightest idea as it tends to struggle with larger datasets.

Configuration

Once you have a database, you'll need to create a configuration file. It must be saved under one of the following paths:

• /etc/supysonic
• ~/.supysonic
• ~/.config/supysonic/supysonic.conf

A roughly documented sample configuration file is provided as config.sample.

The minimal configuration using a SQLite database would be:

[base]
database_uri = sqlite:////some/path/to/a/supysonic.db

For a more details on the configuration, please refer to documentation.

Running the application

As a standalone debug server

It is possible to run Supysonic as a standalone server, but it is only recommended to do so if you are hacking on the source. A standalone won't be able to serve more than one request at a time.

To start the server, just run the cgi-bin/server.py script.

$ python cgi-bin/server.py

By default, it will listen on the loopback interface (127.0.0.1) on port 5000, but you can specify another address on the command line, for instance on all the IPv6 interfaces:

$ python cgi-bin/server.py ::

As an Apache WSGI application

Supysonic can run as a WSGI application with the cgi-bin/supysonic.wsgi file. To run it within an Apache2 server, first you need to install the WSGI module and enable it.

$ apt install libapache2-mod-wsgi-py3
$ a2enmod wsgi

Next, edit the Apache configuration to load the application. Here's a basic example of what it looks like:

WSGIScriptAlias /supysonic /path/to/supysonic/cgi-bin/supysonic.wsgi
<Directory /path/to/supysonic/cgi-bin>
    WSGIApplicationGroup %{GLOBAL}
    WSGIPassAuthorization On
    Require all granted
</Directory>

With that kind of configuration, the server address will look like http://server/supysonic/

Other options

If you use another HTTP server, such as nginx or lighttpd, or prefer to use FastCGI or CGI over WSGI, FastCGI and CGI scripts are also provided in the cgi-bin folder, respectively as supysonic.fcgi and supysonic.cgi. You might need to edit those file to suit your system configuration.

Here are some quick docs on how to configure your server for FastCGI or CGI.

Docker

If you want to run Supysonic in a Docker container, here are some images provided by the community.

• https://github.com/ultimate-pms/docker-supysonic
• https://github.com/ogarcia/docker-supysonic
• https://github.com/foosinn/supysonic
• https://github.com/mikafouenski/docker-supysonic
• https://github.com/oakman/supysonic-docker
• https://github.com/glogiotatidis/supysonic-docker

Quickstart

To start using Supysonic, you'll first have to specify where your music library is located and create a user to allow calls to the API.

Let's start by creating a new admin user this way:

$ supysonic-cli user add MyUserName -p MyAwesomePassword
$ supysonic-cli user setroles -A MyUserName

To add a new folder to your music library, you can do something like this:

$ supysonic-cli folder add MyLibrary /home/username/Music

Once you've added a folder, you will need to scan it:

$ supysonic-cli folder scan MyLibrary

You should now be able to enjoy your music with the client of your choice!

For more details on the command-line usage, take a look at the documentation.

Client authentication

The Subsonic API provides several authentication methods. One of them, known as token authentication was added with API version 1.13.0. As Supysonic currently targets API version 1.9.0, the token based method isn't supported. So if your client offers you the option, you'll have to disable the token based authentication for it to work.

Running the daemon

Supysonic comes with an optional daemon service that currently provides the following features:

• background scans
• library changes detection
• jukebox mode

First of all, the daemon allows running backgrounds scans, meaning you can start scans from the CLI and do something else while it's scanning (otherwise the scan will block the CLI until it's done). Background scans also enable the web UI to run scans, while you have to use the CLI to do so if you don't run the daemon.

Instead of manually running a scan every time your library changes, the daemon can listen to any library change and update the database accordingly. This watcher is started along with the daemon but can be disabled to only keep background scans.

Finally, the daemon acts as a backend for the jukebox mode, allowing to play audio on the machine running Supysonic.

The daemon is supysonic-daemon, it is a non-exiting process. If you want to keep it running in background, either use the old nohup or screen methods, or start it as a systemd unit (see the very basic supysonic-daemon.service file).

Upgrading

To upgrade your Supysonic installation, simply re-run the command you used to install it (either python setup.py install or pip install .).

Some commits might introduce changes in the database schema. Starting with commit e84459d627 (August 29th, 2018) migrations will be automatically applied.

If your database was created prior to this date, you'll have to manually apply unapplied migrations up to the latest. Once done you won't have to worry about future migrations as they'll be automatically applied. Migration scripts are provided in the supysonic/schema/migration folder, named by the date of commit that introduced the schema changes. There could be both SQL scripts or Python scripts. The Python scripts require arguments that are explained when the script is invoked with the -h flag.