Installation manual
Before proceeding, make sure to follow the preparation steps.

Deployment bundle services
The Docker Compose bundle is holding the following set of services.
Service |
Required |
Description |
---|---|---|
engine-recorder |
✅ |
Record audio blocks, including archive sync |
The required services are needed for minimal functionality.
Setup PipeWire as a system wide daemon
While it is possible to run PipeWire completely inside containers, we recommend a slightly different approach. Instead, create a service to run pipewire and wireplumber in a headless session directly on your host. This provides better performance and still allows you to use your audio devices on the host machine. If you have already done this step for the AURA Playout setup you can skip ahead to the next point.
make aura-playout.pw.install
This creates the necessary system services, loads the default pipewire configuration to /etc/pipewire/pipewire.conf
and creates the socket which pipewire later uses to communicate with aura-playout. After everything is installed you need to reboot your machine for the changes to take effect.
sudo reboot
Deploy AURA Recorder
All required files can be found under config/aura-recorder
. For the described commands change to that directory.
Then copy the sample.env
to .env
and set all values as needed.
cp sample.env .env
Update the configuration file
Update at least following environment variables in the .env
file:
AURA_RECORDER_AUDIO_SOURCE
: The audio device from which the audio will be recorded. It is also possible to set a stream.AURA_AUDIO_STORE
: The location where the recorder saves all recordings.
Make sure that the user aura
can write to AURA_AUDIO_STORE
.
source .env
mkdir -p "${AURA_AUDIO_STORE}/recordings/block"
chown -R aura:aura "${AURA_AUDIO_STORE}"
Using a ALSA audio device
Currently AURA Recorder only supports ALSA devices or audio streams. When using a audio interface, make sure to provide the sample format in the override config. For future releases we plan to read the sample rate directly from the audio device.
Start the services with Docker Compose:
docker compose up -d
After successful start-up, you should see the AURA_AUDIO_STORE
get populated.
Archive recordings
In order to archive or backup recorded audio blocks you can set up a rsync
cronjob like:
crontab -e
0 2 * * * rsync -avz /opt/aura/audio/recordings/ user@remote-server:/archive/block-recordings