spotifyd

This is all pretty obvious, but recording it here for posterity. spotifyd is an open-source, lightweight Spotify client for Premium accounts. We use it for our home server, which runs a couple of instances to enable Spotify Connect to the home speakers.

Setup is pretty easy but requires a little systemd messing around. Step 1 is to clone the repo and build spotifyd (which needs Rust’s cargo), and then symlink it into /usr/bin. I’m using the pulseaudio backend, so the command to build is cargo build --release --features pulseaudio_backend. Step 2: write

[Unit]
Description=A spotify playing daemon
Documentation=https://github.com/Spotifyd/spotifyd

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/spotifyd --no-daemon
Restart=always
RestartSec=12

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

to /etc/systemd/user/spotifyd.service and chmod it to readable for everyone. Step 3: for each user that wants to run spotifyd, make ~/.config/spotifyd/spotifyd.conf containing

[global]
username = ...
password = ...
device_name = ...

where username and password are your spotify credentials and device_name is the name you want to appear in your Spotify Connect menus. (Ours is “skald”, to continue the Asgard-based naming tradition.)

Finally, step 4 is

systemctl --user enable spotifyd.service
systemctl --user start spotifyd.service

and it should start up. You can check the logs with journalctl --user-unit spotifyd -xe -f.