Navidrome Hosting: Your Own Music Streaming Server

Navidrome is an open-source (GPL-3.0) music server: it reads the tags of your music files, organises them by artist, album and genre, and streams them to a web player and to apps that speak the Subsonic API. Choose it with a plan, pay, and we build the VPS (KVM, NVMe, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS) and install it in about two minutes after boot. You get:

• Navidrome 0.64.2 with its first-run screen already completed, so nobody else can claim the admin account.
• An HTTPS address like yourname-x7k2.devoster.app with a Let's Encrypt certificate, for the web player and for your apps.
• Your admin account already created. You log in with the username admin and a generated password shown in the Devoster dashboard, where you can also reset it.
• Sensible defaults: anonymous usage reporting is off, and artist information and images from Last.fm are on.
• Dashboard controls to open the app, restart, stop or start it, read its logs, run an update and connect your own domain.

The app is free; you pay only the VPS plan, with 10% off yearly. The server comes with full root, free nightly backups kept 3 days plus one snapshot, a dedicated IPv4, 1 Gbps with unlimited bandwidth and DDoS protection. Already have a Devoster VPS? You can install Navidrome on it from VPS Control, after the panel checks the OS, free ports 80/443 and disk, or reinstall the server with it, at no charge. Other apps that install this way are on the One-Click Apps page.

Music goes in over SFTP, using the server's SSH login and any SFTP client (FileZilla, WinSCP, Cyberduck) or rsync. Copy your files into:

/opt/devoster/data/navidrome/music

Navidrome scans that folder and builds the library from the files' tags, not their names, so well-tagged files (artist, album artist, album, track number, year, embedded or folder cover art) give the best result. A tagger such as MusicBrainz Picard or beets is worth a pass over a messy collection before you upload it.

• Formats: common formats such as MP3, FLAC, AAC/M4A, Ogg Vorbis and Opus are read.
• Read-only for Navidrome: the app reads the music folder but never writes to it, so it can't change or delete your files. Edits are made by you, over SFTP.
• New files are picked up automatically, or start a scan from the web UI yourself.

Open your address in a browser for Navidrome's own web player, with playlists, favourites, ratings and a queue. On phones and desktops, use any app that supports the Subsonic or OpenSubsonic API; you give it your HTTPS address, username and password. Popular choices:

Apps differ in offline downloads, gapless playback and car or watch support, so try two before you settle. Some are paid apps from independent developers; none of them is made by Devoster.

Several listeners? Create a user for each person in Navidrome's settings. Each gets their own playlists, favourites and play counts.

Navidrome is one of the lightest apps we offer: about 16 MB of RAM at idle. Streaming files as they are costs little; converting to a lower bitrate on the fly for mobile data takes some CPU per stream but is light for audio. What decides the plan is how big your collection is:

As a rough guide, a lossless album often takes a few hundred MB and an MP3 album around a hundred. You can move to a larger plan from the panel later; plans are not shrunk in place.

• Use a strong password. Subsonic apps log in to your public HTTPS address from anywhere, which is the point; give every user a strong, unique password.
• No email. Navidrome doesn't need mail, and outbound mail ports are blocked by default on Devoster VPS plans anyway. If you forget the admin password, reset it from the Devoster dashboard.
• Backups: nightly backups (kept 3 days) and your snapshot slot cover the whole VPS, including playlists, favourites and play counts. Keep your music files somewhere else too; the server shouldn't hold the only copy.

Share music you own or have the right to stream. If you invite other listeners, that's a private server for people you know, not a public service.

We check new Navidrome versions and apply them in a maintenance hour you choose, or when you press Update now. A snapshot of the VPS is taken first, and if Navidrome doesn't come back healthy the server is rolled back automatically.

The server is unmanaged: you have full root, and its security is your responsibility. Our VPS hardening checklist covers SSH keys and the firewall.

When is it the wrong choice? Navidrome is for music. If you also want movies and shows, Jellyfin handles video and music in one server, and the seedbox adds Lidarr for organising new albums. If you want a music service with a catalogue you don't own, a self-hosted server isn't that.