Development Environment

How to setup your local development environment

Currently these instructions only work for Unix-based systems (Linux, macOS, BSD, …). This is just a summary on how to get started. More information will soon be available. If you are stuck or have any questions, please join our Discord server and give us a shout on the #dev channel

Getting started

  1. Install GoLang 1.15. Make sure to add $GOPATH/bin to your PATH

  2. Install Node 14

  3. Install TagLib

    • Ubuntu: sudo apt install libtag1-dev
    • macOS: brew install taglib

  4. Clone the project from https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome

  5. Install development tools: make setup-dev

  6. Test installation: make buildall. This command should create a navidrome executable in the project’s folder

  7. Create a navidrome.toml config file in the project’s folder with the following options:

# Set your music folder, preferable a specific development music library with few songs,
# to make scan fast
MusicFolder = "/path/to/music/folder"

# Make logging more verbose
LogLevel = "debug"

# This will always create an `admin` user with the specified password, so you don't have to 
# create a user every time you delete your dev database
DevAutoCreateAdminPassword = "password"

# Move the data/DB folder to a different location
DataFolder = "./data"

# If developing in macOS with the firewall enabled, this avoids having to accept incoming 
# network connections every time the server restarts
Address = "localhost"

To start Navidrome in development mode, just run make dev. This will start both the backend and the frontend in “watch” mode, so any changes will automatically be reloaded.

If you get errors on any of these steps, join our chat for support.


Last modified February 6, 2021: Move project to Navidrome GitHub organization (d29d459)