Play

Play is your company's dj.

Background

We want to play music at our office. Everyone has their own library on their own machines, and everyone except for me plays shitty music. Play is designed to make office music more palatable.

Play is api-driven and web-driven. All music is dropped on a central Mac system. Once it's available to Play, users can control what's being played. Users can either use a nice web view or the API, which lends itself for use on the command line or through Campfire.

Play will play all the songs that are added to its Queue. Play will play the crap out of that Queue. And you know what? If there's nothing left in the Queue, Play will figure out who's in the office and play something that they'll like.

No shit.

Install

The underlying tech of Play uses afplay to control music (for now), so you'll need a Mac. afplay is just a simple command-line wrapper to OS X's underlying music libraries, so it should come preinstalled with your Mac, and it should play anything iTunes can play.

Play also expects MySQL to be installed.

Install the gem

Play itself is installed with a gem.

gem install play

Fill out ~/.play.yml

You'll need to set up your configuration values, which we store in ~/.play.yml. You can view the example file on GitHub.

Set up your database

This is a bit of a pain that we'll correct eventually. For now, create your MySQL database by hand. We expect the database to be called play, but it's really pulled from whatever you have in ~/.play.yml. When that's set up, run:

bin/play --migrate

Set up your GitHub application

Next, go to GitHub and register a new OAuth application. Users sign in with their GitHub account. Copy the Client ID and Client Secret into Play's ~/.play.yml file.

Set up your music folder

Next, tell Play where to look for music. It's the path attribute in ~/.play.yml. We'll then look at your path and import everything recursively when you run:

play -i

Alternatively, you can just start up the web server (play -w) and it will listen for any changes you make to your music directory. In other words, once the web component has started, if you drop in a new directory of music, it'll realize that and go ahead and index it.

Play

Once you're all set up, you can spin up the web app with:

play -w

You can hit the server at localhost:5050. Queue some hawt, hawt music up. We'll wait.

Ready? Cool. The only thing left to do is actually start the music server. That's done with:

play -d

You'll detach it and put it in the background, where it will sit waiting for salacious music to play for you. When you want to kill it for reals, run:

play -s

For all the fun commands and stuff you can do, just run:

play -h

Set up your office (optional)

This isn't a required step. If nothing's in the queue and Play has still been told to play something, it'll just play random music. But you can set it up so it will play a suitable artist for someone who's currently in the office.

That particular step is left to the reader's imagination — here at GitHub we poll our router's ARP tables and update an internal application with MAC addresses — but all Play cares about is a URL that returns comma-separated string identifiers. We get that string by hitting the office_url in ~/.play.yml. The string that's returned from that URL should look something like this:

holman,kneath,defunkt

That means those three handsome lads are in the office right now. Once we get that, we'll compare each of those with the users we have in our database. We do that by checking a user attribute called office_string, which is just a unique identifier to associate back to Play's user accounts. In this example, I'd log into my account and change my office_string to be "holman" so I could match up. It could be anything, though; we actually use MAC addresses here.

API

Play has a full API that you can use to do tons of fun stuff. In fact, the API is more feature-packed than the web UI. Because we're programmers. And baller.

Check out the API docs on the wiki.

Local development

If you're going to hack on this locally, you can use the normal process for writing a Sintara app (rackup, shotgun, et cetera). The only thing we kind of do differently in Play is we disable the GitHub OAuth callback (since your development URL is different than it would be in production).

To actually use it locally, we'll automatically create a user called user for you when you first access the app. You can sign into this user by hitting /devlogin on your running instance.

None of this happens if you launch Play with bin/play -d.

Current Status

This is pretty rough. For the most part it should run pretty reliably for you, but there's a bit of setup and configuration that I'd like to refine and do away with until it's "ready" for prime time.

Once it's ready, pretty sure I'm going to make the most awesome screencast, and then it's balls-out from there.

♬ ★★★

This was created by Zach Holman. You can follow me on Twitter as @holman.

I usually find myself playing Justice, Kanye West, and Muse at the office.