[pulseaudio-discuss] Proper way for a server to spawn Pulseaudio?

[Espen Jürgensen]

Dear all, first of all thanks for your work on the Pulseaudio project!

I maintain a Linux music server, and I am working on adding a Pulseaudio
output for it. This is for local output. So far it has been simple and easy
working with Pulseaudio, but going ahead I am unsure about the best way of
spawning the Pulseaudio daemon. I hope someone here can give advice.

Most users of the music server will have it running as either root or a
dedicated user, and will run it on a headless server without any desktop
environment. Could be an RPi, for instance. So pretty much like mpd.

In such a setup the music server currently gets "Connection refused",
unless Pulseaudio has manually been started in system mode by the user (I
think...?). So, I have googled what to do in that situation, and that has
left me a little a confused. For instance, some of the mpd guides say that
Pulseaudio should autospawn - but that doesn't seem to happen for me, so
perhaps there is some condition that needs to be met? I have, of course,
set autospawn = yes (was already the default).

Other guides tell you to use TCP and add "auth-ip-acl=127.0.0.1" in
default.pa - but that seems a bit clumsy? Then there is also
recommendations on adding the server user to the Pulseaudio groups (pulse,
pulse-access), which I have tried, but which didn't seem to change much.

Of course, I would like to inconvenience the user as little as possible
with configuration activities, so with that in mind my question is: What is
the proper way to make a server spawn Pulseaudio, given that it is running
as root or dedicated user and that there is no desktop?

Espen
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