On Thu, 2016-09-01 at 01:04 +0300, Tanu Kaskinen wrote: > On Wed, 2016-08-31 at 23:03 +0200, Espen Jürgensen wrote: > > > > Dear all, first of all thanks for your work on the Pulseaudio project! > > > > I maintain a Linux music server, and I am working on adding a Pulseaudio > > output for it. This is for local output. So far it has been simple and easy > > working with Pulseaudio, but going ahead I am unsure about the best way of > > spawning the Pulseaudio daemon. I hope someone here can give advice. > > > > Most users of the music server will have it running as either root or a > > dedicated user, and will run it on a headless server without any desktop > > environment. Could be an RPi, for instance. So pretty much like mpd. > > > > In such a setup the music server currently gets "Connection refused", > > unless Pulseaudio has manually been started in system mode by the user (I > > think...?). So, I have googled what to do in that situation, and that has > > left me a little a confused. For instance, some of the mpd guides say that > > Pulseaudio should autospawn - but that doesn't seem to happen for me, so > > perhaps there is some condition that needs to be met? I have, of course, > > set autospawn = yes (was already the default). > > Autospawning works only in the per-user mode. In the system mode the > expectation is to have an init script or a systemd service that starts > pulseaudio at boot (with systemd, socket activation is possible too). > > We don't provide init scripts or systemd service file for the system > mode. Init scripts can't be provided, because they are not portable > across distributions. Shipping a systemd service file would probably > make sense, though. > > > > > Other guides tell you to use TCP and add "auth-ip-acl=127.0.0.1" in > > default.pa - but that seems a bit clumsy? Then there is also > > recommendations on adding the server user to the Pulseaudio groups (pulse, > > pulse-access), which I have tried, but which didn't seem to change much. > > With the default settings, all users that want to use pulseaudio when > it's running in the system mode have to be in the pulse-access group. > The pulse group is only meant for the pulseaudio daemon - don't add > users to that group. > > > > > Of course, I would like to inconvenience the user as little as possible > > with configuration activities, so with that in mind my question is: What is > > the proper way to make a server spawn Pulseaudio, given that it is running > > as root or dedicated user and that there is no desktop? > > I think starting pulseaudio at boot in the system mode makes most > sense for headless systems. I don't think another server-type > application should spawn it. > > When your server runs under a dedicated user, autospawning should work, > but then you'll probably run into problems with not having access to > the audio hardware, because typically the device permissions are > handled dynamically so that only the currently-active login session has > access. Trying to "fix" this by making the device permissions static > will cause breakage, because your music server will then hog the > hardware so that regular users can't access it anymore. It's probably > best if you use the PA_CONTEXT_NOAUTOSPAWN flag in your application > when connecting to pulseaudio, unless your application runs inside a > regular user login session. I forgot to mention - before telling users how to configure pulseaudio to run in the system mode, make them read this first, so they know the problems: https://wiki.freedesktop.org/www/Software/PulseAudio/Documentation/User/WhatIsWrongWithSystemWide/ -- Tanu
