Interaction with the server

Liquidsoap starts with one or several scripts as its configuration, and then streams forever if everything goes well. Once started, you can still interact with it by means of the server. The server allows you to run commands. Some are general and always available, some belong to a specific operator. For example the request.queue() instances register commands to enqueue new requests, the outputs register commands to start or stop the outputting, display the last ten metadata chunks, etc.

The protocol of the server is a simple human-readable one. Currently it does not have any kind of authentication and permissions. It is currently available via two media: TCP and Unix sockets. The TCP socket provides a simple telnet-like interface, available only on the local host by default. The Unix socket interface (cf. the server.socket setting) is through some sort of virtual file. This is more constraining, which allows one to restrict the use of the socket to some privileged users.

You can find more details on how to configure the server in the documentation of the settings key server, in particular server.telnet for the TCP interface and server.socket for the Unix interface. Liquidsoap also embeds some documentation about the available server commands.

Using telnet

Now, we shall simply enable the Telnet interface to the server, by setting settings.server.telnet := true or simply passing the -t option on the command-line. In a complete case analysis we set up a request.queue() instance to play user requests. It had the identifier "queue". We are now going to interact via the server to push requests into that queue:

dbaelde@selassie:~$ telnet localhost 1234
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.localdomain.
Escape character is '^]'.
queue.push /path/to/some/file.ogg
5
END
request.metadata 5
[...]
END
queue.push http://remote/audio.ogg
6
END
request.trace 6
[...see if the download started/succeeded...]
END
exit

Of course, the server isn’t very user-friendly. But it is easy to write scripts to interact with Liquidsoap in that way, to implement a website or an IRC interface to your radio. However, this sort of tool is often bound to a specific usage, so we have not released any of ours.

Web interface

Another simple way to test the telnet server consists in using the

server.harbor()

server.harbor api: https://www.liquidsoap.info/doc-2.0.0/reference-extras.html#server.harbor

command which will start a web interface accessible at http://localhost:8000/telnet providing an emulation of a telnet.

Interactive variables

Sometimes it is useful to control a variable using telnet. A simple way to achieve this is to use the interactive.float function. For instance, in order to dynamically the volume of a source:

# Register a telnet variable named volume with 1 as initial value
v = interactive.float("volume", 1.)

# Change the volume accordingly
source = amplify(v, source)

The first line registers the variable volume on the telnet. Its value can be changed using the telnet command

var.set volume = 0.5

and it can be retrieved using

var.get volume

Similarly, we can switch between two tracks using interactive.bool and switch as follows:

# Activate the telnet server
settings.server.telnet := true

# The two sources
s1 = playlist("~/Music")
s2 = sine()

# Create an interactive boolean
b = interactive.bool("button", true)

# Switch between the tracks depending on the boolean
s = switch(track_sensitive=false,[(b,s1), ({true},s2)])

# Output the result
output.pulseaudio(s)

By default the source s1 is played. To switch to s2, you can connect on the telnet server and type var.set button = false.

Web interface

A nice web interface can be obtained by running

interactive.harbor()

interactive.harbor api: https://www.liquidsoap.info/doc-2.0.0/reference.html#interactive.harbor

after all interactive variables have been defined. This will start a web server accessible at http://localhost:8000/interactive on which you can easily change the values for the interactive variables.

Persistency

By default, interactive variables are not persistent, which means that their values are lost if you restart the script. This can be changed by running the command

interactive.persistent("vars.json")

after all the interactive variables have been defined. This will store the values of all the interactive variables in the file vars.json (in JSON format) whenever you modify them, and reload them next time your run your script. This can be very handy for setting parameters for sound effects for instance.

Securing the server

The command server provided by liquidsoap is very convenient for manipulating a running instance of Liquidsoap. However, no authentication mechanism is provided. The telnet server has no authentication and listens by default on the localhost (127.0.0.1) network interface, which means that it is accessible to any logged user on the machine.

Many users have expressed interest into setting up a secured access to the command server, using for instance user and password information. While we understand and share this need, we do not believe this is a task that lies into Liquidsoap’s scope. An authentication mechanism is not something that should be implemented naively. Being SSH, HTTP login or any other mechanism, all these methods have been, at some point, exposed to security issues. Thus, implementing our own secure access would require a constant care about possible security issues.

Rather than doing our own home-made secure access, we believe that our users should be able to define their own secure access to the command server, taking advantage of a mainstream authentication mechanism, for instance HTTP or SSH login. In order to give an example of this approach, we show here how to create a SSH access to the command server: we create a SSH user that, when logging through SSH, has only access to the command server.

First, we enable the unix socket for the command server in Liquidsoap:

settings.server.socket := true
settings.server.socket.path := "/path/to/socket"

When started, liquidsoap will create a socket file /path/to/socket that can be used to interact with the command server. For instance, if your user has read and write rights on the socket file, you can do

socat /path/to/socket -

The interface is then exactly the same has for the telnet server.

We define now a new `shell''. This shell is in fact the invocation of the socat command. Thus, we create a/usr/local/bin/liq_shell` file with the following content:

#!/bin/sh
# We test if the file is a socket, readable and writable.
if [ -S /path/to/socket ] && [ -w /path/to/socket ] && \
   [ -r /path/to/socket ]; then
  socat /path/to/socket -
else
# If not, we exit..
  exit 1
fi

We set this file as executable, and we add it in the list of shells in /etc/shells.

Now, we create a user with the liq_shell as its shell:

adduser --shell /usr/local/bin/liq_shell liq-user

You also need to make sure that liq-user has read and write rights on the socket file.

Finally, when logging through ssh with liq-user, we get:

11:27 toots@leonard % ssh liq-user@localhost
liq-user@localhost's password:
Linux leonard 2.6.32-4-amd64 #1 SMP Mon Apr 5 21:14:10 UTC 2010 x86_64

The programs included with the Debian GNU/Linux system are free software;
the exact distribution terms for each program are described in the
individual files in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright.

Debian GNU/Linux comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent
permitted by applicable law.
Last login: Tue Oct  5 11:26:52 2010 from localhost
help
Available commands:
(...)
| exit
| help [<command>]
| list
| quit
| request.alive
| request.all
| request.metadata <rid>
| request.on_air
| request.resolving
| request.trace <rid>
| uptime
| var.get <variable>
| var.list
| var.set <variable> = <value>
| version

Type "help <command>" for more information.
END
exit
Bye!
END
Connection to localhost closed.

This is an example of how you can use an existing secure access to secure the access to liquidsoap’s command server. This way, you make sure that you are using a mainstream secure application, here SSH.

This example may be adapted similarly to use an online HTTP login mechanism, which is probably the most comment type of mechanism intended for the command line server.