Project of the Week: Koel — Open Source Spotify
For all the lip service paid to developers about how important they are, rarely does anyone take the time to shine a spotlight on them for all the cool non propriety stuff they build. Every once in awhile, in between Apple rumours and Microsoft trolling, a tech news site will write a small feature story on a dev hack, usually falling under the funny, memey, or cutesy categories. We’re going to make a habit of showing of the most interesting projects every week, because every Batman deserves their Bruce Wayne moment.
This week we stumbled across Koel a personal music streaming site. Think of it as your own private Spotify or Rdio (RIP). It comes out of the box with a beautifully designed dark theme, full song lyrics, and even drag n’ drop playlist creation. If you already have all your music stored on your computer this is miles ahead of iTunes. It’s got great UX and, even better, there’s no ads.
It’s definitely worth trying out if you’re looking for a way to manage your own music without the constant software upgrades of iTunes. Setting it up is as simple as a few terminal commands and selecting your music folder. If you really want to be adventurous try deploying it on AWS or Digital Ocean to get access to it anywhere.
The wiki for this project is pretty straight forward, just follow the instructions.
Make sure to check out more of lead developer Phan An’s work here.
Pro Tip: I had some trouble setting up the database with the default settings from the wiki. Using these values in your .env file instead will make it easier for you to get started right away:
DB_HOST=localhost
DB_DATABASE=mysql
DB_USERNAME=root
DB_PASSWORD=''Also It may seem silly to note but make sure your versions of node, php, and mysql are up to date and that your permissions are in order.
