// the find
blackcandy-org/blackcandy
A self hosted music streaming server
Black Candy is a self-hosted music streaming server built on Rails with Hotwire, giving you a Spotify-like experience over your own music library. It ships as a single Docker image with SQLite as the default database, making first-run dead simple. Aimed at developers and privacy-conscious users who want to own their music infrastructure.
Docker-first deployment that actually works out of the box — one command and you're streaming. SQLite default with a clean PostgreSQL escape hatch is the right call for a personal server. Native mobile apps on both iOS (App Store) and Android (F-Droid) with Strada bridge controllers means the web and native clients share logic instead of duplicating it. The CSS architecture (settings/objects/components/utilities split) is unusually disciplined for a Rails side project.
Requires Ruby 4.0, which as of mid-2026 is still very new — if anything breaks in the Ruby runtime you're stuck waiting on upstream fixes with no fallback. No transcoding format selection exposed to the user: the transcoded stream controller exists but there's no visible way to configure bitrate or codec targets, which matters on constrained connections. Multi-user support exists but the permission model is binary (admin or not) — no per-user library isolation, so you can't safely share an instance with people you don't fully trust. No import from streaming services or playlist export (M3U, etc.), so migrating your existing playlists in or out requires manual work.