Installing Airsonic on a Raspberry Pi

This guide will walk you through the process of deploying Airsonic on a Raspbery Pi running Debian 9 Stretch using Tomcat 8.

NOTE: We suggest not to use the OpenJDK package because Airsonic will take more than 1 hour to deploy. See this issue for more details.

NOTE: If you are using a distribution that does not include Oracle’s JDK 8 in the repositories, e.g. OSMC, you will need to add a repository to install Oracle JDK. Several webpages document how to add a repository and install it using apt tools and can be found using your favourite search engine.

Install required packages

Install tomcat8 and oracle-java8-jdk using apt:

sudo apt install oracle-java8-jdk tomcat8

If you could not set JAVA_HOME using sudo update-alternatives --config java, do the following:

List the available Java versions:

ls -l /usr/lib/jvm

drwxr-xr-x 8 root root 4096 Jan  6 22:24 java-8-oracle

Open /etc/default/tomcat8 and hardcode the path to JAVA_HOME:

# The home directory of the Java development kit (JDK). You need at least
# JDK version 7. If JAVA_HOME is not set, some common directories for
# OpenJDK and the Oracle JDK are tried.
JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-8-oracle/

Deploy Airsonic

Download the latest airsonic.war package from the download page, or with the command below:

wget https://github.com/airsonic/airsonic/releases/download/v10.6.2/airsonic.war

Create the Airsonic directory and assign ownership to the Tomcat system user (if running tomcat as a service):

sudo mkdir /var/airsonic/
sudo chown -R tomcat8:tomcat8 /var/airsonic/

Stop the tomcat8 service:

sudo systemctl stop tomcat8.service

Remove the possible existing airsonic files from the TOMCAT_HOME:

sudo rm /var/lib/tomcat8/webapps/airsonic.war
sudo rm -R /var/lib/tomcat8/webapps/airsonic/
sudo rm -R /var/lib/tomcat8/work/*

Move the downloaded WAR file in the TOMCAT_HOME/webapps/ folder:

sudo mv airsonic.war /var/lib/tomcat8/webapps/airsonic.war

Restart the tomcat8 service:

sudo systemctl start tomcat8.service

Be patient (several minutes at least on Raspberry pi 3), you can follow the deployment using sudo tail -f /var/log/tomcat8/catalina.out and wait for the following message:

INFO: Deployment of web application archive /var/lib/tomcat8/webapps/airsonic.war has finished in 146,192 ms

Airsonic should be running at http://localhost:8080/airsonic if installed locally, replace localhost with your server IP address if installed remotely.

Set up a reverse proxy

If you have a nginx reverse proxy, add to /etc/nginx/sites-available/default (or another config file if you’re not using the default one) and add just before the last }:

location /airsonic/ {

proxy_pass http://localhost:8080;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Host $host;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Server $host;
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP         $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For   $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto https;
proxy_set_header Host              $http_host;
proxy_max_temp_file_size           0;
proxy_redirect                     http:// https://;
}

Restart nginx:

sudo service nginx restart

And then go to:

https://yourdomain.com/airsonic

Set up a transcoder

Update your package list:

sudo apt update

Install ffmpeg package:

sudo apt install ffmpeg

Create a transcode directory within your AIRSONIC_HOME directory:

sudo mkdir /var/airsonic/transcode

Within the transcode directory symlink to ffmpeg and verify correct permissions:

cd /var/airsonic/transcode/
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/ffmpeg
sudo chown -R tomcat8:tomcat8 /var/airsonic
ls -l

lrwxrwxrwx 1 tomcat8 tomcat8 15 Jan  7 09:46 ffmpeg -> /usr/bin/ffmpeg

NOTE: user has to be the user that runs Airsonic