upmpdcli is an UPnP Media Renderer front-end to MPD, the Music Player Daemon. It supports both pure UPnP and the OpenHome ohMedia services.

Security

upmpdcli is not audited for security issues, and, as far as I know, it may be full of exploitable bugs. Do not run it on an Internet-facing host.

Configuration

See the man page for command line details. In most situations, upmpdcli will be run as follows:

upmpdcli -D -c /etc/upmpdcli.conf

The -D option tells upmpdcli to fork and run in background. The -c option specifies a configuration file.

The configuration file has a simple name = value format.

The configuration parameters can be set from the command line, a configuration file, or the environment in this order of priority. It would be rather confusing to use a mix of methods, so you should probably chose one. Some less common parameters can only be set in the configuration file.

All parameters have defaults, and a typical installation needs no modification of the configuration file. If several instances of upmpdcli run on the same network, you will want to give them distinct names (friendlyname parameter). The other parameters are only useful in special situations.

The following parameters can be set:

What

Command line

Environment

Config variable

Configuration file name

-c config

$UPMPD_CONFIG

Host name or IP address where MPD runs

-h mpdhost

$UPMPD_HOST

mpdhost

TCP port for MPD

-p mpdport

$UPMPD_PORT

mpdport

MPD password

mpdpassword

Do we own the MPD queue and fearlessly clear it

-o 0/1

ownqueue

UPnP "friendly name" for the device. This gets displayed in network search results.

-f friendlyname

$UPMPD_FRIENDLYNAME

friendlyname

Log file name. Leave empty for stderr

-d logfilename

logfilename

Verbosity level (0-4)

-l loglevel

loglevel

UPnP network interface

-i iface

$UPMPD_UPNPIFACE

upnpiface

UPnP IP address (if interface not set)

upnpip

UPnP port

-p port

$UPMPD_UPNPPORT

upnpport

OpenHome support switch

-O 0/1

openhome

OpenHome playlist disk persistence (default 1)

ohmetapersist

Directory for cached data (/var/cache/upmpdcli or ~/.cache/upmpdcli)

cachedir

Path to icon to be displayed by control point. See note

iconpath

Path to HTML file to be used as presentation page. See note

presentationhtml

iconpath note: the UPnP protocol has provisions for a renderer to send the URL to a descriptive icon as part of the device description. The icon to use can be set using the iconpath configuration file parameter. Due to current (and probably permanent) upmpdcli limitations, the image file must be a 64x64 32 bits-per-pixel png file.

presentationhtml note: the file referenced by the path will only be read once when upmpdcli starts, it can’t presently be used for status updates (but I guess that you could put a redirect in there, to something more dynamic served by a real HTTP server).

OpenHome ohMedia services

The support for ohMedia services (play queue managed by the player instead of on the control point) is activated by default as of release 0.8.0, only an explicit option will turn it off.

The previous version default was set to off in the software, and on in the configuration file. As the configuration file is not usually overwritten during an upgrade, if you are upgrading to 0.7.x from an earlier version and you want to enable the services, you need to set the option in the configuration file.

Songcast integration

upmpdcli recent versions support Songcast. See the description here.

Boot time startup

upmpdcli will try to change its uid to user upmpdcli if it is started by root. It will refuse to run if the user does not exist.

If started by root, upmpdcli will also write its process id to /var/run/upmpdcli.pid.

There are boot-time startup scripts in the debian/ directory inside the source tree (for Debian/Ubuntu/Mint/Raspbian etc.). There is also a systemd service file under systemd/ (for Fedora et al.).

The boot scripts are installed by the pre-built packages, so will just have to edit the configuration file after installing them, all the rest should just work.

Building

For building from source, you will need a recent C++ compiler (C++11), and the development packages for libupnp version 1.6, libcurl, libmpdclient, and libexpat.

If you are using the source from Github, you will also need the autoconf/automake/libtool trio. Use the autogen.sh script to set things up.

The libupnpp library, which used to be part of upmpdcli, has been separated, and you need to build it first.

So you need to either clone two github repositories: https://github.com/medoc92/libupnpp and https://github.com/medoc92/upmpdcli, or download the release tar files from the the download area

Once the source is extracted, the procedure is standard and there are currently no specific configure options:

# Only for git source
sh autogen.sh
./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc
make
sudo make install

Which you should apply first to the libupnpp source, then to upmpdcli.

If you omit the --sysconfdir=/etc part, upmpdcli.conf will end up in /usr/etc/, which is ok, but confusing, as package installers put it in /etc/