We’ve compiled a whole raft of roundups covering static site generators, but Faircamp is completely different.
Faircamp is designed to offer the best featured of Bandcamp, an online and app music distribution service for musicians. The service lets artists sell their music. Faircamp is free and open source software.
Installation
We tested Faircamp in Ubuntu 23.10. There’s a deb package available. Download this package with the command:
$ wget https://simonrepp.com/faircamp/packages/faircamp_0.13.0-1+deb12_amd64.deb
We can install the package with the command:
$ sudo dpkg -i faircamp_0.13.0-1+deb12_amd64.deb
In Operation
To generate your static site, change into the directory which contains your audio files and issue the command:
$ faircamp --preview
The software builds a complete, static website that presents your music to your audience. You can view the site on your computer or upload it to any webhost. No database is needed and no PHP code is necessary.
We ran the above command on a small test music library.
Once the static site is built, we can point our web browser to localhost:8080.
Here’s how an album is presented.
For a production site, you just need to copy the generated files to your web server.
Features include:
- Responsive design.
- Music streaming.
- Support for single artist sites, collaborative projects, and even entire labels.
- Automatically generated downloads in your chosen formats.
- Automatically generated covers lend visual elegance to your catalog when you don’t get around to create visuals.
- Customizable graphics.
- Separate images for individual tracks.
- Access-control via passwords.
- Voucher codes.
- Internationalization support.
Summary
Faircamp is a novel music platform. It can take a while for the files to be generated. But it’s quite powerful and works well.
Many open source projects skimp on the documentation. That’s not the case here.
Website: simonrepp.com/faircamp
Support: Codeberg Code Repository
Developer: Simon Repp
License: GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
Faircamp is written in Rust. Learn Rust with our recommended free books and free tutorials