Installing SM2 - ymatto/Station-Manager-2 GitHub Wiki

Overview

In short, installing Station Manager 2 is just a matter of cloning the repo (or downloading it directly). All that's missing is:

• Liquidsoap, the specialized audio/video stream language that the core SM2 scripts use.
• Icecast, what SM2 uses to broadcast your netradio streams to the world.

Using Docker, these two dependencies can be automatically handled without having to install them directly.

SM2 expects that all of the files that make your netradio stations unique – music playlists, configuration files, etc. – are stored together in their own folder, wherever you want that to be. The SM2 repo includes an example folder that provides an example of such a station folder that you can run to see what SM2 can do and refer to as you set up your own station.

Get Set Up

First, clone the Station-Manager-2 repo (or download it from the latest release).

Now you'll need to decide between two different ways to run your SM2 station:

Option 1: Run SM2 with Dockerized Liquidsoap/Icecast

Using Docker is highly recommended as the easiest to get running, operate, and maintain. Going this way makes it trivial to migrate to new versions of Liquidsoap and Icecast as needed, and lets you spin a complete netradio station system up and down using simple Docker commands.

Taking this approach, the only thing additional you need to install is Docker on your host machine. There is nothing special to the setup for SM2 – just follow the official directions. Using Docker Desktop provides a nice GUI for viewing the status of your entire SM2 station system.

The SM2 docs won't try to explain basic Docker concepts and operation, and if you're not already familiar, you should go through Docker's excellent documentation to get oriented. But the process of starting up the example SM2 station is as simple as one Docker CLI command.

Once you've got Docker installed, you can go on to Running SM2 with Docker.

Option 2: Run SM2 with local installs of Liquidsoap/Icecast

SM2 is equally happy being run with Liquidsoap installed directly on your host machine, broadcasting via Icecast similarly installed.

However, these docs will not try to explain the process of installing these tools.

Click here for Liquidsoap's installation docs.

You can find the version of Liquidsoap that SM2 targets in the example/docker-compose.yml file. Look for the sm2 image, which will be of the form savonet/liquidsoap:vXXXXX.

SM2 should not require any special dependencies and can use a pretty vanilla Liquidsoap install.

Click here for Icecast's Basic Setup guide.

Once installed, you'll need to configure an icecast.xml file. You can find an SM2-specific example in example/icecast.xml.

Once you've got Liquidsoap and Icecast installed, and your Icecast server running, you're ready to configure your netradio station, which will require a little extra work as the example config files are set up for Docker usage.

A guide to running SM2 this way is coming later.