Spotify Daemon in Docker

Alsa	Alsa dbus	Pulseaudio	Pulseaudio dbus

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Spotifyd within a docker container for ARM and x86 architectures. Comes in flavors alsa/pulseaudio for audio-backend and with/without dbus support. There is a sample spotifyd.conf config catering to the alsa-dbus variant in the repository which you can use to bootstrap your container. This config is valid for version 0.4.0, but may change depending on development at spotifyd and librespot.

NOTE: only the alsa-dbus variant has been tested, if you have a working pulseaudio setup, feel free to contribute a working config or a working docker-compose definition.

How to run the alsa-dbus variant

services:
  spotifyd:
    container_name: spotify
    restart: always
    image: hvalev/spotifyd-alsa-dbus
    network_mode: host
    # Keep in mind to keep the ports for zeroconf and mdns open on the host
    devices:
      - /dev/snd:/dev/snd
    volumes:
      - {YOUR_CONFIG_PATH}/spotifyd.conf:/etc/spotifyd.conf

How to run the pulseaudio variant

services:
  spotify:
    container_name: spotify
    restart: always
    image: hvalev/spotifyd-pulseaudio
    user: ${PUID}:${PGID}
    network_mode: host
    devices:
      - /dev/snd:/dev/snd
    environment: 
      - PULSE_SERVER=unix:/tmp/pulseaudio.socket
      - PULSE_COOKIE=/tmp/pulseaudio.cookie
    volumes:
      - /run/user/1000/pulse/native:/tmp/pulseaudio.socket
      - {YOUR_CONFIG_PATH}/spotifyd.conf:/etc/spotifyd.conf

Insights

On a raspberry-pi with the alsa-dbus variant and using softvol for volume_controller only the volume range 60-100 is usable. Everything below that is very quiet.

With version 0.4.0, the authentication has changed to use zeroconf for authentication and mDNS to announce the service to the network. mDNS requires a device to announce it's service and only devices 1 hop away on the local network can actually discover it. Thus, running spotifyd in a container prevents mDNS from working. The quick and dirty fix is to run network_mode: host and use the host's network. Beware that in that case spotify will use the ports 33797 for zeroconf (if you use the config in the repo) and 5353 for mDNS. This won't be implicit or obvious in the docker-compose.yml defition. There is an option to use something like avahi-daemon to reflect mdns traffic, but it requires a lot more configuration.

How to build it

Grab the dockerfile with the configuration you wish to build and remove --platform=$BUILDPLATFORM from the first image. Since a single Dockerfile is used for all images, you also need to add --target alsa-dbus-release or another flavor to build along with your build command.

Information

At the moment the rust-fix intermediary build image exists as a workaround to this bug.

Limitations

Spotifyd requires a Spotify Premium account.

Acknowledgements

Naturally, all credit goes to spotifyd. The instructions, dockerfile and explanation at GnaphronG/docker-spotifyd have been very helpful in getting this up and running.