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How to setup a PulseAudio output inside containers

This tutorials walks you though the steps required to setup a PulseAudio output when running LibreTime inside containers.

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We assume you already installed LibreTime using docker-compose.

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1. Create a PulseAudio server socket​

First you need to create a PulseAudio connection socket on the host:

pactl load-module module-native-protocol-unix socket=$(pwd)/pulse.socket

To persist the socket after a reboot, you can save the socket configuration to a file:

mkdir -p ~/.config/pulse
cp /etc/pulse/default.pa ~/.config/pulse/default.pa
echo "load-module module-native-protocol-unix socket=$(pwd)/pulse.socket" | tee -a ~/.config/pulse/default.pa
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See man default.pa for more details on how to persist a PulseAudio configuration.

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Make sure that the PulseAudio connection socket is owned by the same user running inside the container. By default the user inside the container will be 1000:1000, so you should be fine if your host user also has the uid 1000.

2. Configure the PulseAudio client​

Next, you need to configure the PulseAudio client inside the liquidsoap container. Save the following configuration file to pulse.client.conf:

pulse.client.conf
default-server = unix:/tmp/pulse.socket

# Prevent a server running in the container
autospawn = no
daemon-binary = /bin/true

# Prevent the use of shared memory
enable-shm = false

Configure the liquidsoap service in your docker compose file using the following settings:

docker-compose.yml
services:
  liquidsoap:
    volumes:
      - ./pulse.socket:/tmp/pulse.socket # Mount the PulseAudio server socket
      - ./pulse.client.conf:/etc/pulse/client.conf # Mount the PulseAudio client configuration

3. Configure LibreTime with the new PulseAudio output​

Finally, you need to configure LibreTime to output to the PulseAudio client, add the following to your configuration file:

config.yml
stream:
  outputs:
    system:
      - enabled: true
        kind: pulseaudio

You can now start/restart LibreTime, and check the logs for any errors.

docker-compose down
docker-compose up -d

docker-compose logs -f liquidsoap