fun4jimmy/piaudio

A web interface for controlling audio services on a Raspberry Pi.

piaudio

piaudio is a web application designed to run on a Raspberry Pi, allowing the control of audio services via a web frontend. This allows the Raspberry Pi to be controlled via a web browser on a phone, instead of remoting on to the device and stopping and starting the various services via the command line.

Under the hood it uses Flask for serving the web pages and Connexions for providing the REST api that controls the audio services.

Supported Audio Services

• Plexamp - For streaming music and audio from a Plex server. This also supports music being casted to the Raspberry Pi from other Plex clients.
• alsaloop - For forwarding the Raspberry Pi auxillary input to the audio output. This allows the Raspberry Pi to act as a pass through audio device.

Requirements

• Raspberry Pi or similar Unix device.
• Python 3.8 or later.
• alsaloop.
• Plexamp (See the Plex forums for instructions on installing Plexamp for Raspberry Pi v.20 beta 2 as a service).

Installation

• Install the requirements for a nginx server and a Python virtual environment for the application.

  sudo apt update
  sudo apt install python3 python3-venv
  sudo apt install uwsgi uwsgi-plugin-python3
  sudo apt install nginx
  

• Setup a Python virtual environment.

  mkdir piaudio
  cd piaudio
  python3 -m venv venv
  venv/bin/pip install --upgrade pip
  

• Install the application in the new virtual environment (note: piaudio requires setuptools 46.4.0 or later).

  venv/bin/pip install --upgrade setuptools
  venv/bin/pip install https://github.com/fun4jimmy/piaudio/archive/main.tar.gz
  

  To install a specific version change the github link to refer to one of the release bundles eg. https://github.com/fun4jimmy/piaudio/archive/v1.0.0.tar.gz.

• Create an ini file (eg. piaudio.ini) for the uwsgi configuration.

  [uwsgi]
  # Set the require the uwsgi plugin
  plugin = python3
  # the application factory function (make_app) within our application package (piaudio)
  module = piaudio:make_app()
  # the relative path to our virtual environment (working directory is set in the service config)
  virtualenv = venv
  
  # there aren't any other uwsgi processes so we are the master.
  master = true
  # we're not expecting many concurrent requests so limit uswgi to a single process
  processes = 1
  
  # name the socket for communication with nginx
  socket = piaudio.sock
  # make sure the group owner nginx can read and write to the socket.
  chmod-socket = 660
  # clean up the socket on exit
  vacuum = true
  
  # relative path to the uwsgi log (working directory is set in the service config)
  daemonize = uwsgi.log
  
  die-on-term = true
  

• Add a service for the application uwsgi instance so it will automatically start with the Raspberry Pi.

  /etc/systemd/system/piaudio.service:

  [Unit]
  Description=uWSGI instance to serve piaudio
  After=network.target
  
  [Service]
  User=<username>
  Group=www-data
  # all paths in piaudio.ini are relative to this directory
  WorkingDirectory=/home/<username>/piaudio
  ExecStart=/usr/bin/uwsgi --ini piaudio.ini
  
  [Install]
  WantedBy=multi-user.target
  

• Add a nginx site definition for the application.

  /etc/nginx/sites-available/piaudio:

  server {
    listen 80;
    server_name piaudio;
  
    location / {
      include uwsgi_params;
      uwsgi_pass unix:///home/<username>/piaudio/piaudio.sock;
    }
  }
  

• Add the nginx site to the list of enable sites, test the definition is ok and restart nginx.

  sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/piaudio /etc/nginx/sites-enabled
  sudo nginx -t
  sudo systemctl restart nginx