How to have your own server to stream music

All of us who love music know Spotify, so we're going to learn how to have our own server to store our music, which we can then listen to from any of our devices (Android, iOS, PC, etc.), without needing to install anything from the Google Play Store or anywhere else.

For this we will use Koel , an open-source tool with a long history and an excellent development community.

What is Koel?

koel, owes its name to a singing bird, it arises from the need to have a complete, usable, free and beautiful tool to store music on a server, which will then be played from other devices.

It is built with the Laravel framework for the client side and Vue.js for the server side, using ECMAScript , Sass and HTML5, it is designed to be used with any of the modern browsers, its installation and use is quite simple.

This application has a very neat interface, in addition to having features such as random music, uploading music with drag and drop, name change, among others.

How to install Koel

Before installing Koel we must meet certain requirements for the server side

Koel server requirements

• All Laravel requirements - PHP, OpenSSL, composer and such.
• MySQL or MariaDB.
• The latest stable version of NodeJS with npm for VueJS

Installing Koel on the Server

From the console run the following commands:

cd PUBLIC_DIR git clone https://github.com/phanan/koel.git .
git checkout v2.2.0 # Check the latest version at https://github.com/phanan/koel/releases
composer install

Now modify the .env with your data. These are the minimum values ​​that you must fill in:

• DB_CONNECTION, DB_HOST, DB_DATABASE, DB_USERNAME, DB_PASSWORD
• ADMIN_EMAIL, ADMIN_NAME, ADMIN_PASSWORD
• APP_MAX_SCAN_TIME

After you have configured your .env start your koel instance, with the following command

php artisan koel: init

Then you can access your music streaming server server, accessing from your browser to http://localhost:8000/

Conclusions about Koel

Without a doubt, Koel is a fairly robust tool that solves a fairly common problem, which is being able to access your music without restriction from anywhere and with any device.

It is also important to emphasize that Koel has various features such as Playlist, grouping of songs by artist, album, etc., it can also be integrated with song lyrics services.

And finally, if you wish, you can also register users to whom you want ( and have permission ) to share the music you have stored.