Black Candy

Black Candy is a self-hosted music streaming server, your personal music center.

Try The Demo

Please visit https://demo.blackcandy.org and use demo user (email: [email protected], password: foobar) to log in. And feel free to try it.

[!NOTE] This demo user does not have administrator privileges. So you cannot experience all the features in Black Candy. And all music in the demo are from Free Music Archive. You can check their licenses.

Installation

Black Candy uses docker image to install easily. You can run Black Candy like this.

docker run -p 80:80 ghcr.io/blackcandy-org/blackcandy:latest 

# Or pull from Docker Hub.
docker run -p 80:80 blackcandy/blackcandy:latest 

That's all. Now, you can access either http://localhost or http://host-ip in a browser, and use initial admin user to log in (email: [email protected], password: foobar).

Upgrade

[!IMPORTANT] If you upgrade to a new version, you need to read the upgrade guide carefully before upgrade. Because there are may some breaking changes in a new version.

Please Check the Upgrade Guide for upgrading to a new version

Upgrade Black Candy is pull new image from remote. Then remove an old container and create a new one.

docker stop <your_blackcandy_container>
docker rm <your_blackcandy_container>
docker pull ghcr.io/blackcandy-org/blackcandy:latest
docker run <OPTIONS> ghcr.io/blackcandy-org/blackcandy:latest 

With docker compose, you can upgrade Black Candy like this:

docker-compose down
docker pull ghcr.io/blackcandy-org/blackcandy:latest
docker-compose up

Mobile Apps

Black Candy mobile apps are available in the following app stores:

For Android app, you can also download APK from GitHub Release

Configuration

Port Mapping

Black Candy exports the 80 port. If you want to be able to access it from the host, you can use the -p option to map the port.

docker run -p 3000:80 ghcr.io/blackcandy-org/blackcandy:latest

Media Files Mounts

You can mount media files from host to container and use MEDIA_PATH environment variable to set the media path for black candy.

docker run -v /media_data:/media_data -e MEDIA_PATH=/media_data ghcr.io/blackcandy-org/blackcandy:latest   

Use PostgreSQL As Database

Black Candy use SQLite as database by default. Because SQLite can simplify the process of installation, and it's an ideal choice for self-hosted small server. If you think SQLite is not enough, or you are using some cloud service like heroku to host Black Candy, you can also use PostgreSQL as database.

docker run -e DB_ADAPTER=postgresql -e DB_URL=postgresql://yourdatabaseurl ghcr.io/blackcandy-org/blackcandy:latest 

How to Persist Data

All the data that need to persist in Black Candy are stored in /rails/storage, So you can mount this directory to host to persist data.

mkdir storage_data

docker run -v ./storage_data:/rails/storage ghcr.io/blackcandy-org/blackcandy:latest 

Running as an Arbitrary User

When mounting volumes, you may encounter permission issues between the host and the Docker container. To resolve this issue, pass the UID and GID with the --user to set the same UID and GID as your host user.

docker run --user 2000:2000 -v ./storage_data:/rails/storage ghcr.io/blackcandy-org/blackcandy:latest 

Logging

Black Candy logs to STDOUT by default. So if you want to control the log, Docker already supports a lot of options to handle the log in the container. See: https://docs.docker.com/config/containers/logging/configure/.

Secret Key Base

Black Candy uses cryptography to protect sessions and other security-sensitive data, and needs a secret value as the basis of those secrets. This value can be anything, but it should be unguessable, and specific to your instance.

You can use any long random string for this. One way to generate one is with openssl:

openssl rand -hex 64

Once you have one, set it in the SECRET_KEY_BASE environment variable:

docker run -e SECRET_KEY_BASE=your_generated_secret ghcr.io/blackcandy-org/blackcandy:latest

If SECRET_KEY_BASE is not set, Black Candy will generate a new one on each startup, which will invalidate all existing sessions.

Example

And if you would like to use docker compose to run Black Candy. Here is an example docker-compose.yml file.

services:
  app:
    image: ghcr.io/blackcandy-org/blackcandy:latest
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "3000:80"
    volumes:
      - storage_data:/app/storage
      - ./media_data:/media_data
    environment:
      SECRET_KEY_BASE: fake_secret_key
      MEDIA_PATH: /media_data

volumes:
  storage_data:

Environment Variables

Name	Default	Description
DB_URL		The URL of PostgreSQL database. You must set this environment variable if you use PostgreSQL as database.
CABLE_DB_URL		The URL of Pub/Sub database. You must set this environment variable if you use PostgreSQL as database.
QUEUE_DB_URL		The URL of background job database. You must set this environment variable if you use PostgreSQL as database.
CACHE_DB_URL		The URL of cache database. You must set this environment variable if you use PostgreSQL as database.
MEDIA_PATH		You can use this environment variable to set media path for Black Candy, otherwise you can set media path in settings page.
DB_ADAPTER	"sqlite"	There are two adapters are supported, "sqlite" and "postgresql".
SECRET_KEY_BASE		When the SECRET_KEY_BASE environment variable is not set, Black candy will generate SECRET_KEY_BASE environment variable every time when service start up. This will cause old sessions invalid, You can set your own SECRET_KEY_BASE environment variable on docker service to avoid it.
FORCE_SSL	false	Force all access to the app over SSL.
DEMO_MODE	false	Whether to enable demo mode, when demo mode is on, all users cannot access administrator privileges, even user is admin. And also users cannot change their profile.
HTTP_PORT	80	The port that Black Candy listens on inside the container. Useful when you want to run Black Candy on a port other than 80.

Edge Version

The edge version of Black Candy base on master branch, which means it's not stable, you may encounter data loss or other issues. However, I don't recommend normal user using an edge version. But if you are a developer who wants to test or contribute to Black Candy, you can use the edge version.

docker pull ghcr.io/blackcandy-org/blackcandy:edge

Development

Requirements

• Ruby 4.0
• Node.js 20
• libvips
• FFmpeg

Make sure you have installed all those dependencies.

Install gem dependencies

bundle install

Install JavaScript dependencies

npm install

Database Configuration

rails db:prepare
rails db:seed

Start all services

After you’ve set up everything, now you can run ./bin/dev to start all services you need to develop. Then visit http://localhost:3000 use initial admin user to log in (email: [email protected], password: foobar).

Running tests

# Running all test
$ rails test:all 

# Running lint
$ rails lint:all

Integrations

Black Candy support get artist and album image from Discogs API. You can create an API token from Discogs and set Discogs token on Setting page to enable it.

Sponsorship

This project is supported by: