In order to compile librespot, you will first need to set up a suitable Rust build environment, with the necessary dependencies installed. You will need to have a C compiler, Rust, and the development libraries for the audio backend(s) you want installed. These instructions will walk you through setting up a simple build environment.
The easiest, and recommended way to get Rust is to use rustup. Once that’s installed, Rust's standard tools should be set up and ready to use.
Note: The current minimum required Rust version at the time of writing is 1.48, you can find the current minimum version specified in the .github/workflow/test.yml file.
To ensure a consistent codebase, we utilise rustfmt and clippy, which are installed by default with rustup these days, else they can be installed manually with:
rustup component add rustfmt
rustup component add clippyUsing rustfmt is not optional, as our CI checks against this repo's rules.
Along with Rust, you will also require a C compiler.
On Debian/Ubuntu, install with:
sudo apt-get install build-essential
On Fedora systems, install with:
sudo dnf install gcc Depending on the chosen backend, specific development libraries are required.
Note this is an non-exhaustive list, open a PR to add to it!
| Audio backend | Debian/Ubuntu | Fedora | macOS |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rodio (default) | libasound2-dev |
alsa-lib-devel |
|
| ALSA | libasound2-dev, pkg-config |
alsa-lib-devel |
|
| GStreamer | gstreamer1.0-plugins-base libgstreamer-plugins-base1.0-dev gstreamer1.0-plugins-good libgstreamer-plugins-good1.0-dev |
gstreamer1 gstreamer1-devel gstreamer1-plugins-base-devel gstreamer1-plugins-good |
gstreamer gst-devtools gst-plugins-base gst-plugins-good |
| PortAudio | portaudio19-dev |
portaudio-devel |
portaudio |
| PulseAudio | libpulse-dev |
pulseaudio-libs-devel |
|
| JACK | libjack-dev |
jack-audio-connection-kit-devel |
jack |
| JACK over Rodio | libjack-dev |
jack-audio-connection-kit-devel |
jack |
| SDL | libsdl2-dev |
SDL2-devel |
sdl2 |
| Pipe & subprocess | - | - | - |
For example, to build an ALSA based backend, you would need to run the following to install the required dependencies:
On Debian/Ubuntu:
sudo apt-get install libasound2-dev pkg-config
On Fedora systems:
sudo dnf install alsa-lib-develThe recommended method is to first fork the repo, so that you have a copy that you have read/write access to. After that, it’s a simple case of cloning your fork.
git clone [email protected]:YOURUSERNAME/librespot.gitOnce your build environment is setup, compiling the code is pretty simple.
To build a debug build with the default backend, from the project root run:
cargo buildAnd for release:
cargo build --releaseYou will most likely want to build debug builds when developing, as they compile faster, and more verbose, and as the name suggests, are for the purposes of debugging. When submitting a bug report, it is recommended to use a debug build to capture stack traces.
There are also a number of compiler feature flags that you can add, in the event that you want to have certain additional features also compiled. The list of these is available on the wiki.
By default, librespot compiles with the rodio-backend feature. To compile without default features, you can run with:
cargo build --no-default-featuresSimilarly, to build with the ALSA backend:
cargo build --no-default-features --features "alsa-backend"Assuming you just compiled a debug build, you can run librespot with the following command:
./target/debug/librespotThere are various runtime options, documented in the wiki, and visible by running librespot with the -h argument.
Note that debug builds may cause buffer underruns and choppy audio when dithering is enabled (which it is by default). You can disable dithering with --dither none.