Installation

Requirements

Regardless of your chosen installation method, the following is required to successfully deploy Funkwhale:

  • A dedicated domain or subdomain: it is not possible to deploy Funkwhale on a subdirectory of an existing domain.

  • Access to ports 80 and/or 443: if you cannot serve the Funkwhale web app and API on these ports, federation will not work

Note

Because of the federated nature of Funkwhale, it is strongly recommended not to change the Funkwhale domain after initial deployment, as it is likely to break your installation.

Project architecture

The project relies on the following components and services to work:

  • A web application server (Python/Django/Gunicorn)

  • A PostgreSQL database to store application data

  • A redis server to store cache and tasks data

  • A celery worker to run asynchronous tasks (such as music import)

  • A celery scheduler to run recurrent tasks

  • A ntp-synced clock to ensure federation is working seamlessly

Note

The synced clock is needed for federation purpose, to assess the validity of incoming requests.

Hardware requirements

Funkwhale is not especially CPU hungry. On a dockerized instance with 2 CPUs and a few active users, the memory footprint is around 500Mb:

CONTAINER                   MEM USAGE
funkwhale_api_1             202  MiB
funkwhale_celerybeat_1      96   MiB
funkwhale_celeryworker_1    168  MiB
funkwhale_postgres_1        22   MiB
funkwhale_redis_1           1    MiB

Some users have reported running Funkwhale on Raspberry Pis with a memory consumption of less than 350 MiB.

Thus, Funkwhale should run fine on commodity hardware, small hosting boxes and Raspberry Pi. We lack real-world examples of such deployments, so don’t hesitate do give us your feedback (either positive or negative).

Check out Optimizing your Funkwhale instance for advice on how to tune your instance on small configurations.

Software requirements

Software requirements will vary depending of your installation method. For Docker-based installations, the only requirement will be an Nginx reverse-proxy that will expose your instance to the outside world.

If you plan to install your Funkwhale instance without Docker, most of the dependencies should be available in your distribution’s repositories.

Note

Funkwhale works only with Python >= 3.5, as we need support for async/await. Older versions of Python are not supported.

Available installation methods

Funkwhale can be installed using one of the following method:

Warning

The All-In-One-Container or Mono-Container installation is deprecated, don’t use it for new installations. For more information, visit our blog: https://blog.funkwhale.audio/deprecation-all-in-one-container.html

  • Quick install, the most straight forward way to get Funkwhale;

  • Mono-container Docker installation;

  • Multi-container Docker installation;

  • Manual Debian and Arch Linux installation;

  • Ansible role.

Further, Funkwhale packages are available for the following platforms:

Quick install

To install the latest version of Funkwhale on a recent Debian or Ubuntu server, run:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install curl
sudo sh -c "$(curl -sSL https://get.funkwhale.audio/)"

This installation script will ask you a few questions, install the required dependencies and set up your instance.

Additional info:

  • This script is based on our Ansible role.

  • By default, the script installs Nginx, PostgreSQL, Redis and Funkwhale itself but you can customize the installation procedure if you already have some of these services available on your machine

  • Edit your pod configuration in /srv/funkwhale/ansible/playbook.yml and apply new configuration with sudo /srv/funkwhale/ansible/reconfigure

  • Upgrade is done using sh -c "$(curl -sSL https://get.funkwhale.audio/upgrade.sh)".

Alternative installation methods

Running Funkwhale on the develop branch

Traditional deployments are done using tagged releases. However, you may want to benefit from the latest changes available, or to help detect bugs before they are included in actual releases.

To do that, you’ll need to run your instance on the develop branch, which contains all the unreleased changes and features of the next version.

Please take into account that the develop branch may be unstable and will contain bugs that may affect the well-being of your instance. If you are comfortable with that, you need to backup at least your database before pulling the latest changes from the develop branch.

Otherwise, the deployment process is similar to deploying with releases. You simply need to use export FUNKWHALE_VERSION=develop in the installation and upgrade process instead of a real version number, as we build artifacts on the development branch the same way we do for releases.

It’s also recommended to check out the develop release notes before upgrading, since you may have to apply manual actions for your instance to continue to work. Such actions are labelled with [manual action required] in the releases notes.

Serving only the frontend

Note

You do not need to do this if you are deploying using Docker, as frontend files are already included in the docker image.

You also do not need to do this if you are deploying manually on Debian or Arch, as this is covered by the corresponding documentation already.

Files for the web frontend are purely static and can simply be downloaded, unzipped and served from any webserver:

cd /srv/funkwhale
curl -L -o front.zip "https://dev.funkwhale.audio/funkwhale/funkwhale/builds/artifacts/|version|/download?job=build_front"
unzip front.zip

Reverse proxy configuration

In order to make Funkwhale accessible from outside your server and to play nicely with other applications on your machine, you should configure a reverse proxy.

We offer sample configurations for Nginx, Apache2 and Caddy.

Note

You can freely adapt the proposed configuration to your own needs, as we cannot cover every use case with a single template, especially when it’s related to SSL configuration.

Nginx

Ensure you have a recent version of nginx on your server. On a Debian-based system use apt:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nginx

On Arch Linux and its derivatives:

sudo pacman -S nginx

To avoid configuration errors at this level, we will generate an nginx configuration using your .env file. This will ensure your reverse-proxy configuration always matches the application configuration and makes upgrade/maintenance easier.

Note

The following commands need to be run as superuser.

On docker deployments, run the following commands:

export FUNKWHALE_VERSION="|version|"

# download the needed files
curl -L -o /etc/nginx/funkwhale_proxy.conf "https://dev.funkwhale.audio/funkwhale/funkwhale/raw/$FUNKWHALE_VERSION/deploy/funkwhale_proxy.conf"
curl -L -o /etc/nginx/sites-available/funkwhale.template "https://dev.funkwhale.audio/funkwhale/funkwhale/raw/$FUNKWHALE_VERSION/deploy/docker.proxy.template"

# create a final nginx configuration using the template based on your environment
set -a && source /srv/funkwhale/.env && set +a
envsubst "`env | awk -F = '{printf \" $%s\", $$1}'`" \
    < /etc/nginx/sites-available/funkwhale.template \
    > /etc/nginx/sites-available/funkwhale.conf

ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/funkwhale.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/

On non-docker deployments, run the following commands:

export FUNKWHALE_VERSION="1.2.10"

# download the needed files
curl -L -o /etc/nginx/funkwhale_proxy.conf "https://dev.funkwhale.audio/funkwhale/funkwhale/raw/1.2.10/deploy/funkwhale_proxy.conf"
curl -L -o /etc/nginx/sites-available/funkwhale.template "https://dev.funkwhale.audio/funkwhale/funkwhale/raw/1.2.10/deploy/nginx.template"
# create a final nginx configuration using the template based on your environment
set -a && source /srv/funkwhale/config/.env && set +a
envsubst "`env | awk -F = '{printf \" $%s\", $$1}'`" \
    < /etc/nginx/sites-available/funkwhale.template \
    > /etc/nginx/sites-available/funkwhale.conf

ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/funkwhale.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/

Note

The resulting file should not contain any variables such as ${FUNKWHALE_HOSTNAME}. You can check that using this command:

grep '${' /etc/nginx/sites-available/funkwhale.conf

Finally, enable the resulting configuration:

ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/funkwhale.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/

Warning

If you plan to use in-place import, ensure the alias value in the _protected/music location matches your MUSIC_DIRECTORY_SERVE_PATH env var.

Finally, check that the configuration is valid with nginx -t then reload your nginx server with sudo systemctl reload nginx.

Note

Music (and other static) files are never served by the app itself, but by the reverse proxy. This is needed because a webserver is way more efficient at serving files than a Python process.

However, we do want to ensure users have the right to access music files, and it can’t be done at the proxy’s level. To tackle this issue, we use nginx’s internal directive.

When the API receives a request on its music serving endpoint, it will check that the user making the request can access the file. Then, it will return an empty response with a X-Accel-Redirect header. This header will contain the path to the file to serve to the user, and will be picked by nginx, but never sent back to the client.

Using this technique, we can ensure music files are covered by the authentication and permission policy of your instance, while remaining as performant as possible.

Apache2

Note

These instructions are for Debian only. For Arch Linux please refer to the Arch Linux wiki.

Ensure you have a recent version of Apache2 installed on your server. You’ll also need the following dependencies:

sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-xsendfile

Add the following to your .env file:

REVERSE_PROXY_TYPE=apache2

Then restart Funkwhale. This is needed to ensure Funkwhale provides proper headers for media file serving.

Then, download our sample virtualhost file:

curl -L -o /etc/apache2/sites-available/funkwhale.conf "https://dev.funkwhale.audio/funkwhale/funkwhale/raw/1.2.10/deploy/apache.conf"
ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/funkwhale.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/

Tweak the configuration file according to your setup, especially the TLS configuration. Otherwise, defaults should work if you followed the installation guide.

Check the configuration with apache2ctl configtest and once you’re done, load the new configuration with service apache2 restart.

Caddy

We currently do not support a Caddy-only setup, but you can help develop it!

To employ Caddy as a reverse proxy in front of your docker containers (either mono- or multi-container setup), use the following Caddyfile configuration:

Caddy v2:

yourdomain.funkwhale

reverse_proxy 127.0.0.1:5000

Caddy v1:

yourdomain.funkwhale {
    proxy / 127.0.0.1:5000 {
        transparent
        websocket
        header_upstream X-Forwarded-Host {host}:{server_port}
    }
}

HTTPS configuration

After configuring the reverse proxy, you need a SSL certificate to enable HTTPS on your server (unless you use Caddy, which handles them automatically).

The default reverse proxy configuration assumes you have those available at /etc/letsencrypt/live/${FUNKWHALE_HOSTNAME}/, which is the path used by certbot when generating certificates with Let’s Encrypt.

If you already have a certificate you would like to use, simply update the reverse proxy configuration and replace the following values with the proper paths: - For nginx: ssl_certificate and ssl_certificate_key; - For Apache2: SSLCertificateFile and SSLCertificateKeyFile.

If you don’t have one, comment or remove the lines starting with ssl_certificate and ssl_certificate_key for nginx, and SSLCertificateFile and SSLCertificateKeyFile for Apache2. You can then proceed to generate a certificate, as shown below. These instructions are provided by certbot <https://certbot.eff.org/instructions>:

# install certbot
sudo snap install core; sudo snap refresh core
sudo snap install --classic certbot
sudo ln -s /snap/bin/certbot /usr/bin/certbot

# if you are using nginx: generate the certificate
sudo certbot --nginx -d yourfunkwhale.domain

# if you are using Apache2: generate the certificate
sudo certbot --apache -d yourfunkwhale.domain

This creates a valid certificate and edit the nginx or Apache2 configuration to use the new certificate. The certificate will be automatically renewed when they expire.