Open Source Music Streaming with Koel

What happens when you run out of storage on your computer for all your music?

Developer Phan An had this problem and decided to create a brand new app that he named Koel to address this problem. Koel is an open source personal music streaming app that is designed to run on a web server and built on top of Laravel and Vue.js.

“I wanted something that would be easy to install”, Phan said when asked why he choose Laravel to power the app.

Koel requires you to own your music and here is how it works:

Koel is simple. It doesn’t handle uploading. It doesn’t stream from Spotify. Instead, you upload your songs into a readable directory on your server – preferably outside of your web root dir – and configure Koel to scan and sync it.


Features include searching, sorting, view by artists or albums, playlists, liking/unliking songs, and you can create users to share songs. It also includes shortcut keys:

• F to set the focus into global search box
• Enter to play a song. If multiple songs are being selected, Enter adds them to the bottom of the queue, Shift+Enter queues them to top. Adding a Shift into the combo plays the first selected song right away.
• Space to toggle playback
• J to play the next song in queue
• K to play the previous song in queue

You can download and install Koel from Github.