I’ve been a happy iTunes Match user since the service was introduced. I have a large music collection and I don’t always want to dedicate the required amount of iPhone and computer storage to keeping it available all the time on all my devices. iTunes Match lets Apple deal with storing the whole thing and allows me to just download what I want on a given device or stream music I own to any device I’d like. It’s been $25/year well spent.
That being said, with streaming music plans taking over the market, I can’t imagine Apple’s going to want to offer this service forever, plus I prefer to self-host as much of my digital needs as possible. Finding a way to replicate these features though has proven a bit tough. There were a few projects that would allow me to stream my music but I don’t want to use up my whole data plan streaming songs over and over again or have my music drop out every time I’m in a dead zone. Thankfully, I found Libresonic, which in concert with an app on my iPhone checks a lot of these boxes.
I installed Libresonic several times before I was happy with the install and I wanted to write-up a quick post so I’ll be able to do it again when the server I’m hosting it on gets replaced.
My final install has Libresonic running on the same web server I use for a few other tasks and with the music library linked via a samba share, instead of copied locally. Additionally, I am proxying the tomcat web server on port 8080 through my apache config, which is setup for SSL.
Step one is to installed OpenJDK and tomcat. This is a pretty simple command:
yum install openjdk tomcat
Once done, it’s basically good to go. You can enable tomcat, which is a java based web server, to start on boot.
systemctl enable tomcat
Now, you need to download the ‘war’ file for Libresonic. Head over to this link: http://libresonic.github.io/download/, and download the ‘WAR Version’, not the Standalone Version.
Move the file to where Tomcat is expecting it, which is /var/lib/tomcat/webapps/ on my Centos 7 server. Be sure to rename the file to just ‘libresonic.war’ instead of ‘libresonic-vXX.war’ as the name of the file, before the extension, is the location it will be served from. If you leave the file as ‘libresonic-vXX’ it will be available at http://your.server:8080/libresonic-vXX.
Once that is in place, create a folder and make it owned by the tomcat user for libresonic to use for config data.
mkdir /var/libresonic
chown -Rfv tomcat:tomcat /var/libresonic
Now, we can finally start tomcat, which will bring up Libresonic.
systemctl start tomcat
Now, keep an eye on the logs your system is generating to know when it’s online. Even though tomcat will start, Libresonic will take a minute or more to fully be ready.
journalctl -f
Keep watching until you see something in the log that says how long the app took to start.
Once done, head over to localhost, or your server’s IP, followed by the port and sub-location. Of course, make sure firewall rules are set properly, etc. For instance: http://localhost:8080/libresonic.
With that working, I turned to make it work via my apache config. I am running Apache with a cert from Let’s Encrypt. I edited my ssl.conf file and added the following two lines under the applicable ‘VirtualHost’:
ProxyPass /libresonic http://127.0.0.1:8080/libresonic
ProxyPassReverse /libresonic http://127.0.0.1:8080/libresonic
This bit of code takes the internal tomcat server on the localhost and makes it available via Apache, over SSL. It allows the server to respond when I try to access Libresonic. For instance, if I try to access https://my.awesome.server/libresonic Apache is able to re-point that request through the tomcat server, which is hosting at http://127.0.0.1:8080/libresonic.
With that done, I was able to get to the Libresonic page, login, and setup the system.
To give it access to my music collection, I mounted a SMB share from my main storage server and then symlink’d the full path down to a simpler location, to get rid of any issues with folder names with spaces, permissions, etc.
My only recommendation in this area would be to make sure you mount the SMB share, via fstab, with permissions for the tomcat user. In my case I added a few extra items to the config line in the server’s fstab file uid=tomcat,gid=tomcat to make sure the mounted share can be read by the user that will be accessing it. Then, when I posted the libresonic server the relevant folder, it was able to read the data there.
With that all done, I was all set. I can access my server, via SSL, and use apps on my smart phone to talk to the server as well as download music for offline listening. I am, right now, using SubStreamer on my iPhone and on Android.