Playing on host's pulseaudio from a container

Let's say you have Pulseaudio running on your host - on a Linux desktop, you very probably do. Then you can play sound from a container, without configuring anything on the host side, by binding your pulseaudio socket.

The corresponding options are:

--security-opt label=disable -e PULSE_SERVER=unix:$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/pulse/native -v $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/pulse/native:$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/pulse/native

Let's try it in a more complete example:

podman run --rm -it --security-opt label=disable \
  -e PULSE_SERVER=unix:$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/pulse/native  \
  -v $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/pulse/native:$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/pulse/native \
  savonet/liquidsoap:v2.4.0 'output.pulseaudio(sine())'

That should yun with Docker too, by replacing podman with docker.

No need to use --privileged: we only disable SELinux labelling so the liquidsoap user (default one in that image) can access the bound socket.

Context

Liquidsoap is a bit hard to include in an automated installer (i tried) so for radiotomate I'm preparing a docker image that will be installed in podman quadlets.

Stay tuned!