Installing Liquidsoap

Note These instructions are from the documentation from liquidsoap 2.1.0. Make sure to consult the instructions from the version you wish to install, most likely the latest stable release.

You can install liquidsoap with OPAM (recommended) or from source, or using a package available for your distribution (not covered by this documentation).

Install using OPAM

The recommended method to install liquidsoap is by using the OCaml Package Manager. OPAM is available in all major distributions and on windows. We actively support the liquidsoap packages there and its dependencies. You can read here about how to use OPAM. In order to use it:

A typical installation with MP3 and Vorbis encoding/decoding, http queries and icecast support is done by executing:

opam depext taglib mad lame vorbis cry samplerate ocurl liquidsoap
opam install taglib mad lame vorbis cry samplerate ocurl liquidsoap
  • opam depext ... takes care of installing the required external dependencies. In some cases external dependencies might be missing for your system. If that is the case, please report it to us!
  • Finally opam install ... installs the packages themselves.

Most of liquidsoap’s dependencies are only optionally installed by OPAM. For instance, if you want to enable opus encoding and decoding after you’ve already installed liquidsoap, you should execute the following:

opam depext opus
opam install opus

opam info liquidsoap should give you the list of all optional dependencies that you may enable in liquidsoap.

If you need to run liquidsoap as daemon, we provide a package named liquidsoap-daemon. See savonet/liquidsoap-daemon for more information.

You can also install liquidsoap or any of its dependencies from source using OPAM. For instance:

git clone https://github.com/savonet/liquidsoap.git
cd liquidsoap
opam pin add liquidsoap .

Most dependencies should be compatible with OPAM pinning. Let us know if you find one that isn’t.

Debian/Ubuntu

We generate debian and ubuntu packages automatically as part of our CI workflow. Starting with release 1.4.3, we provide them along with the release. Otherwise, you can visit our github actions to fetch individual ones.

Docker

We provide production-ready docker images via Docker hub. These images contain a minimal debian/testing image with the liquidsoap debian package installed. Installed packages are those generated during our CI process, not the official debian package! Images are tagged by the branch that was used to generate them.

Windows

You can download a liquidsoap for windows from our release page, starting with version 1.3.4.

Liquidsoap for windows is built using opam-cross. The build process is documented in our docker files. Dockerfile.win32-deps installs all the mxe dependencies and Dockerfile.win32 produces the actual liquidsoap binary.

You might want to refer to each project, mxe and opam-cross for more details about cross-compiling for windows.

Installing from source

You can download source code published by Savonet from the github releases page.

The recommended way for newcomers is to use the liquidsoap-full-xxx.tar.gz tarball. This tarball includes all required OCaml bindings and allows you to compile and install liquidsoap in a single configure, make and make install procedure. You will still need the corresponding C libraries and their development files, though.

You will then have to build the source.

Latest development version

If you want a cutting-edge version, you can use the git repository. To get a copy of it, you have to run:

git clone https://github.com/savonet/liquidsoap-full.git liquidsoap
cd liquidsoap
make init

After, that you have to create a list of modules that you want to compile. A good starting point is to do

cp PACKAGES.minimal PACKAGES

and edit the PACKAGES file to uncomment the libraries you are interested in. You should then run the configuration scripts by

./bootstrap
./configure

and finally build Liquidsoap:

make

After that, you should synchronize the repository from time to time using

make update

Some more explanations can be found in the build instructions.