Install ICECAST server in CENTOS for online streaming music & voice

What is Icecast?

Icecast is free software that allows you to stream audio over the Internet from you server. Icecast is compatible with Nullsoft’s Shoutcast.

Install Icecast

The simplest way to install Icecast is via yum. It’s quick and easy, and it’ll be manageable to maintain later. For this example, we’ll discuss installing Icecast on a CentOS server.

Note: This article involves installing software and editing files on the command line. If you’re unfamiliar with using the yum command, a text editor such as nano, or with working on the command line in general, check out this article on logging into your server as root or open a ticket in your ServInt customer portal and our team can complete a basic, unconfigured installation.

1. Once you are logged into your server as root, the first thing to do is install the dependencies that are needed to run Icecast using the following command:

yum install curl-devel libtheora-devel libvorbis-devel libxslt-devel speex-devel

2. Next, you need to grab the EPEL repo that matches your version of CentOS using one of these commands:

CentOS 6 (64 bit):

rpm -ivh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm

CentOS 6 (32 bit):

rpm -ivh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm

CentOS 5 (64 bit):

rpm -ivh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/5/x86_64/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm

CentOS 5 (32 bit):

rpm -ivh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm

3. And now you can install Icecast:

yum install icecast

Configure Icecast

Any custom configuration changes you want to make (such as admin password), can be made in the Icecast conf file:

/etc/icecast.xml

In the past, you had to change the user that Icecast runs as as well as the logging directory. No more! By installing Icecast with yum, the user and logging folder are automatically created and setup. The user is ‘icecast’. The logging folder is: /var/log/icecast

Run Icecast

This is it, the moment you’ve been waiting for. Make sure port 8000 is opened in your firewall and run Icecast with the following command:

icecast -c /etc/icecast.xml -b

Now you can test it by accessing: http://yourdomain.com:8000. You will see a screen like this:

Auto-run/Add to system start up

In the event that your server is ever rebooted, you’ll want to make sure that Icecast automatically starts too. To do so, take that last command we used to run Icecast (above) a