Installation

Provided binaries

We provide pre-built binaries through GitHub Actions for the more popular platforms: Linux, macOS and ARMv7. You can find them here. For extra integrity, the file's SHA-512 gets calculated and uploaded as well.

The provided binaries come in two flavours, slim and full. Each are compiled with different features. slim only contains the platform's most used audio backend, full has also all optional features enabled (see Feature Flags).

Provided packages

There are packages for the following systems:

• Arch Linux (via the Extra repository)
• MacOS (via homebrew)

Building from source

You can also compile Spotifyd yourself, allowing you to make use of feature flags. Spotifyd is written in Rust. You can download the toolchain (compiler and package manager) over at rustup.rs. Follow their instructions to get started.

Note: Please make sure that you compile the package using the most recent stable version of Rust available through rustup. Some distro versions are quite outdated and might result in compilation errors.

Spotifyd might require additional libraries during build and runtime, depending on your platform and the way to compile it (static or dynamic). The following table shows the libraries needed for each OS respectively.

Note: The package names for Linux are the ones used on Debian based distributions (like Ubuntu). You will need to adapt the packages for your distribution respectively.

To compile the binary, run

cargo build --release

To install the resulting binary, run

cargo install --path . --locked

Installing with Cargo

If you have cargo installed, you can directly install spotifyd by running:

cargo install spotifyd --locked

That will compile and install spotifyd's latest version under $HOME/.cargo/bin for you.

Building a Debian package

You can use the cargo-deb create in order to build a Debian package from source. Install it by:

cargo install cargo-deb

Then you can build and install the Debian package with:

cargo deb --install

Note, that when building a Debian package, the --release is passed to the build command already and you do not need to specify it yourself. See for the flags that are set by default in Cargo.toml.

Feature Flags

Spotifyd is split into a base package plus additional features that can be toggled on or off during compilation. Those can be split into two groups: The audio backend features that are responsible for playing back the music and additional functionality features, which enhance your experience using spotifyd.

To enable an additional audio backend, pass <audio_backend_name>_backend as a feature flag. We currently support alsa, pulseaudio and portaudio.

Spotifyd provides the following additional functionality:

Note: Compiling Spotifyd with all features and the pulseaudio backend on Ubuntu would result in the following command: cargo build --release --no-default-features --features pulseaudio_backend,dbus_keyring,dbus_mpris