Web Plugin ========== The ``web`` plugin is a very basic alternative interface to beets that supplements the CLI. It can't do much right now, and the interface is a little clunky, but you can use it to query and browse your music and---in browsers that support HTML5 Audio---you can even play music. While it's not meant to replace the CLI, a graphical interface has a number of advantages in certain situations. For example, when editing a tag, a natural CLI makes you retype the whole thing---common GUI conventions can be used to just edit the part of the tag you want to change. A graphical interface could also drastically increase the number of people who can use beets. Install ------- The Web interface depends on `Flask`_. To get it, just run ``pip install flask``. .. _Flask: http://flask.pocoo.org/ Put ``plugins=web`` in your ``.beetsconfig`` to enable the plugin. Run the Server -------------- Then just type ``beet web`` to start the server and go to http://localhost:8337/. This is what it looks like: .. image:: beetsweb.png You can also specify the hostname and port number used by the Web server. These can be specified on the command line or in the ``[web]`` section of your :doc:`/reference/config`. On the command line, use ``beet web [HOSTNAME] [PORT]``. In the config file, use something like this:: [web] host=127.0.0.1 port=8888 Usage ----- Type queries into the little search box. Double-click a track to play it with `HTML5 Audio`_. .. _HTML5 Audio: http://www.w3.org/TR/html-markup/audio.html Implementation -------------- The Web backend is built using a simple REST+JSON API with the excellent `Flask`_ library. The frontend is a single-page application written with `Backbone.js`_. This allows future non-Web clients to use the same backend API. .. _Flask: http://flask.pocoo.org/ .. _Backbone.js: http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/ Eventually, to make the Web player really viable, we should use a Flash fallback for unsupported formats/browsers. There are a number of options for this: * `audio.js`_ * `html5media`_ * `MediaElement.js`_ .. _audio.js: http://kolber.github.com/audiojs/ .. _html5media: http://html5media.info/ .. _MediaElement.js: http://mediaelementjs.com/