Alpine-PulseAudio

Container for Alpine Linux + PulseAudio + Bluez

---

This image containerizes the PulseAudio Network Sound server to setup a central sound service inside a local network, also runs the Bluez bluetooth daemon to work with bluetooth speakers or sources. Includes Pulsemixer to manage pulseaudio from CLI.

Based on Alpine Linux from my alpine-s6 image with the s6 init system overlayed in it.

The image is tagged respectively for the following architectures,

• armhf
• armv7l
• aarch64
• x86_64 (retagged as the latest )

non-x86_64 builds have embedded binfmt_misc support and contain the qemu-user-static binary that allows for running it also inside an x86_64 environment that has it.

---

Get the Image

---

Pull the image for your architecture it's already available from Docker Hub.

# make pull
docker pull woahbase/alpine-pulseaudio:x86_64

---

Configuration Defaults

---

• PulseAudio config files read from /etc/pulse. If you have custom cards other than your default sound output jack, most likely you will need to edit or remount this with your own. For example, you can keep the files inside config/pulse and mount it as /etc/pulse on start.

• Does not run own systemd or dbus daemon so cards might not get detected automatically, default configuration loads only the defauls Alsa Sink, so will need to modify configurations to detect the new hardware.

• Default configuration listens to ports 4713. Will need to have this port accessible from add devices to get sound. (Check your firewall).

• Bluetooth configurations read from /etc/bluetooth.

• To persist paired bluetooth configurations, preserve the contents of /var/lib/bluetooth by mounting it someplace like config/devices.

• DBUS can cause permission issues if the host is not configured to allow Bluez or PulseAudio. Host configuration defaults for these are provided inside /config/dbus.

• Any drivers for audio (and/or bluetooth as in Rasperry Pis) will need to be installed in the host machine.

• Don't for get to set the environment variable PULSE_SERVER as your server host in the client machines so that they forward their sound to the server. Check out this link for more information.

• To run only the pulseaudio server without starting bluetooth, set the environment variable DISABLEBLUETOOTH to the string true.

---

Run

---

If you want to run images for other architectures, you will need to have binfmt support configured for your machine. multiarch, has made it easy for us containing that into a docker container.

# make regbinfmt
docker run --rm --privileged multiarch/qemu-user-static:register --reset

Without the above, you can still run the image that is made for your architecture, e.g for an x86_64 machine..

This image runs PulseAudio under the user root, but also has a user pulse configured to drop privileges to the passed PUID/PGID which is ideal if its used to run in non-root mode. That way you only need to specify the values at runtime and pass the -u pulse if need be. (run id in your terminal to see your own PUID/PGID values.)

Running make starts the service.

# make
docker run --rm -it \
  --name docker_pulseaudio --hostname pulseaudio \
  -c 256 -m 256m \
  -e PGID=1000 -e PUID=1000 \
  -p 4713:4713 \
  --net=host \
  --cap-add NET_ADMIN \
  --device /dev/snd \
  --device /dev/bus/usb \
  -v config/pulse:/etc/pulse \ # (optional)
  -v /var/run/dbus:/var/run/dbus \
  -v /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro \
  woahbase/alpine-pulseaudio:x86_64

Running make shell gets a shell inside the container, but does not run the init system, so that it can be done manually.

# make shell
docker run --rm -it \
  --name docker_pulseaudio --hostname pulseaudio \
  --entrypoint /bin/bash \
  -c 256 -m 256m \
  -e PGID=1000 -e PUID=1000 \
  -p 4713:4713 \
  --net=host \
  --cap-add NET_ADMIN \
  --device /dev/snd \
  --device /dev/bus/usb \
  -v config/pulse:/etc/pulse \ # (optional)
  -v /var/run/dbus:/var/run/dbus \
  -v /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro \
  woahbase/alpine-pulseaudio:x86_64

Stop the container with a timeout, (defaults to 2 seconds)

# make stop
docker stop -t 2 docker_pulseaudio

Removes the container, (always better to stop it first and -f only when needed most)

# make rm
docker rm -f docker_pulseaudio

Restart the container with

# make restart
docker restart docker_pulseaudio

---

Shell access

---

Get a shell inside a already running container,

# make debug
docker exec -it docker_pulseaudio /bin/bash

set user or login as root,

# make rdebug
docker exec -u root -it docker_pulseaudio /bin/bash

To check logs of a running container in real time

# make logs
docker logs -f docker_pulseaudio

---

Development

---

If you have the repository access, you can clone and build the image yourself for your own system, and can push after.

---

Setup

---

Before you clone the repo, you must have Git, GNU make, and Docker setup on the machine.

git clone https://github.com/woahbase/alpine-pulseaudio
cd alpine-pulseaudio

You can always skip installing make but you will have to type the whole docker commands then instead of using the sweet make targets.

---

Build

---

You need to have binfmt_misc configured in your system to be able to build images for other architectures.

Otherwise to locally build the image for your system. [ARCH defaults to x86_64, need to be explicit when building for other architectures.]

# make ARCH=x86_64 build
# sets up binfmt if not x86_64
docker build --rm --compress --force-rm \
  --no-cache=true --pull \
  -f ./Dockerfile_x86_64 \
  --build-arg DOCKERSRC=woahbase/alpine-s6:x86_64 \
  --build-arg PGID=1000 \
  --build-arg PUID=1000 \
  -t woahbase/alpine-pulseaudio:x86_64 \
  .

To check if its working..

# make ARCH=x86_64 test
docker run --rm -it \
  --name docker_pulseaudio --hostname pulseaudio \
  -e PGID=1000 -e PUID=1000 \
  --entrypoint sh \
  woahbase/alpine-pulseaudio:x86_64 \
  -ec 'pulseaudio --version'

And finally, if you have push access,

# make ARCH=x86_64 push
docker push woahbase/alpine-pulseaudio:x86_64

---

Maintenance

---

Sources at Github. Built at Travis-CI.org (armhf / x64 builds). Images at Docker hub. Metadata at Microbadger.

Maintained by WOAHBase.