TehMusic

TehMusic is a simple collaborative music listening app. You set up playlists, and it will cycle through everyone who's currently DJ'ing, playing their songs.

Yes, this was created in response to turntable.fm's pivot to something not as cool.

Right now, this only supports uploading your own music. So, make sure you're good with copyrights and stuff. Eventually we'd like to add support for things like SoundCloud and YouTube (ick ads). Turntable was awesome cause it had a whole library, but something like that is out-of-scope for a little project like this.

You have to host your own instance of TheMusic, you can't use mine.

Architecture

TehMusic uses Firebase as a backend database and S3 for media storage. There's a small server component used for uploads, authentication, and cycling between DJ's. You can easily run it on a single Heroku dyno.

The front-end is all Ember, of course.

Getting Started (for development)

First clone the repo, (or fork and clone) and install deps:

$ git clone http://github.com/zwily/tehmusic.git
$ cd tehmusic
$ npm install

Configuration time!

TehMusic uses dot-env style configuration, for easy local and easy heroku config:

$ cp .env-example .env

Choose a "join code"

Since this is only intended for casual use between friends, you need to choose a "join code" people need to enter to sign up. Set this as JOIN_CODE in .env.

Set up Firebase

Sign up for a new Firebase at http://firebase.com/. Set the root url of your new Firebase as FIREBASE_ROOT in .env.

Then, go to the "Auth" tab of your firebase, and scroll down to the "Firebase Secrets" section. Generate a secret, and set that in .env as FIREBASE_SECRET.

Then, go to the "Security" tab of your firebase, and copy the contents of firebase-security-rules.json into the provided editor, and click "Save Rules".

Set up S3

If you don't already have an AWS account, create one at https://aws.amazon.com/. Then create an S3 bucket, and enter the bucket name as S3_BUCKET. Then, go to IAM in your AWS console and create an IAM user that has read access to that bucket. Enter the credentials for that IAM user as S3_ACCESS_KEY_ID and S3_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY in .env.

Fire it up.

You can now do some local testing by starting your development server:

$ grunt server

Now open http://localhost:8000/ in a browser.

Deploying to Heroku (for production)

Create yourself an account at http://heroku.com/ and install the heroku command line tool. Then, inside your tehmusic checkout:

$ heroku apps:create

You'll get back a URL to hit your new app at, and it will add it as a git remote in your git repository.

Now you need to configure you app. For every line in your .env file, do heroku config:set <KEY>=<VALUE>.

Now you can push up your app:

$ git push heroku master

And then you should be live!

Heroku dynos will shut down after a few minutes of inactivity, which is kinda sad for this app since it has a backend component that's always talking to firebase. To get around that, you can sign up for Pingdom and have it ping your app once a minute to keep the dyno running.

Dedication

TehMusic is dedicated to the memory of our friend Benji, who was taken too early by cancer. He had many passions, but one of his biggest was music, and sharing it with his friends. RIP Benji.