Spazzer is a web application that can be used to share your music collection via web browser. It provdes an interface for browsing artists, albums and songs in your collection as well as search functionality. Songs can either be downloaded individually or as a per-album zip file.
Spazzer is a wsgi application written in python so, it’s setup does not deviate much from what you would normally do to setup any wsgi application.
Before you begin, python needs to be installed and accessible by your account. To check to see if python is installed, open up a terminal or DOS prompt and type
$ python -V
what should be output is the version of python you have installed, if not, you need to install python for your operating system. The supported version as of this writing is version 2.6.4.
Distribute is an application that installs applications in your python installation. As of this writing it must be installed separately. To see if you have distribute installed, type
$ easy_install --help
which should output the easy_install help message. If it doesn’t you need to install distribute which can be done by downloading distribute_setup.py and running it on the commandline like so.
$ python distribute_setup.py
When this command runs successfully, the easy_install command should be available.
Once python and distribute are installed successfully, you should be able to setup spazzer. From the commandline you must first “cd” to to the path where you unzipped spazzer.
$ cd /path/to/spazzer
/path/to/spazzer$
Next you need to run
/path/to/spazzer$ python setup.py install
This command will download all the packages and libraries that spazzer requires to run into your python installation. Note: if you are installing this into your system python installation you will need to run this command as a user that has permissions to write files into the python distribution such as an Administrator.
Once spazzer has been successfully installed, you are ready to create an instance to run. The reason you create an instance to run is so that you can have multiple instances for different reasons or in the case of a machine used by many users, each user can have their own configuration.
In other words, your view of your music collection does not have to include your 10 year old daughters Hannah Montana collection that she begged to buy you from amazon a while back.
When spazzer was installed a new command should have been put in your path called “spazzer-create” running this command will walk you through creating an instance that you can run.
$ spazzer-create col
Where “col” is the name you want to give to the directory that will store all your files necessary to run spazzer. You will be prompted to enter a port number, or you can accept the default (8088). When the command completes you will have a directory called whatever you named it.
Once you have created an instance you are ready to run your new spazzer site. Inside the directory where your spazzer instance was created there are some commands
To run your spazzer instance you will need to run either “run.bat” on windows, or “run.sh” on presumably everything else. These commands are inside your spazzer instance directory
On Linux:
$ sh col/run.sh
On Windows:
c:\> col\run.bat
At this point you should have it running, you can then access it via a web browser at the following url. If you accepted the default port setting
http://localhost:8088/
Once spazzer is running, you need to tell it where to look for files that you want to make accessible. The page to do that on is at
http://localhost:8088/admin
This is where you tell spazzer what directories it should search for files in. You can add any number of directories however you need at least read permission on the files in those directories in order for spazzer to be able to build an index of your music files.
At anytime, you may want to re-build or update your collection index, like perhaps when you have new files. To do this simply click the update icon on the admin page, depending on how many files you are sharing, it may take a long time. New files will appear in the index when they have been processed. Clicking update will also remove files from your index if they no longer exist in your collection, are no longer accessible, or are no longer contained in directories you have told spazzer to index.
If ever you want to rescan your collection you can do it from the admin web page, or you can simply run the scan.bat command on windows or scan.sh on everything that’s not windows.
If you have a large collection being indexed it can take a while the first time through.