Music Assistant

Music Assistant Server

Music Assistant is a free, opensource Media library manager that connects to your streaming services and a wide range of connected speakers. The server is the beating heart, the core of Music Assistant and must run on an always-on device like a Raspberry Pi, a NAS or an Intel NUC or alike.

Documentation and support

Documentation https://music-assistant.io

Beta Documentation https://beta.music-assistant.io

For issues, please go to the issue tracker.

For feature requests, please see feature requests.

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Running the server

Music Assistant can be operated as a complete standalone product but it is actually tailored to use side by side with Home Assistant, it is meant with automation in mind, hence our recommended installation method is to run the server as a Home Assistant app.

Supported installation methods

The only officially supported ways to run the Music Assistant server are:

• Home Assistant app (recommended) — see https://music-assistant.io/installation/
• Docker container — ghcr.io/music-assistant/server

Both bundle every system dependency the server needs. Although Music Assistant's main code is Python, it depends on external/OS components — a recent ffmpeg (7.0+) with a specific codec set, native libraries (e.g. jemalloc and CIFS/NFS client libraries) and a few bundled binaries — which a plain PyPI/pip install can't provide. The server is therefore not published to PyPI; run it via the app or container above.

Third-party packages (e.g. Linux distributions) are not supported, and issues reported from them may be closed. The bundled credentials for the services Music Assistant integrates with are only licensed for our official builds (see NOTICE), so such builds must supply their own (see music_assistant/helpers/app_vars.py).

Running from source (development)

For local development you provide the system dependencies yourself — Python 3.14+ and ffmpeg 7.0+ are required.

• scripts/setup.sh — create the virtualenv and install dependencies and pre-commit hooks
• python -m music_assistant --log-level debug — run the server locally (listens on http://localhost:8095)
• pytest runs the tests; pre-commit run --all-files runs the linters

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