wireplumber/docs/daemon.md

Daemon

The WirePlumber daemon implements the session & policy management service.

Running

1. First of all, you will need to run PipeWire. PipeWire itself comes with an example session manager that you will need to disable in order to run WirePlumber. This can be achieved by editing src/daemon/pipewire.conf.in on the PipeWire git tree to disable the execution of the session manager:

diff --git a/src/daemon/pipewire.conf.in b/src/daemon/pipewire.conf.in
index bf64c574..e733e76c 100644
--- a/src/daemon/pipewire.conf.in
+++ b/src/daemon/pipewire.conf.in
@@ -24,4 +24,4 @@ load-module libpipewire-module-access
 load-module libpipewire-module-adapter
 load-module libpipewire-module-link-factory
 load-module libpipewire-module-session-manager
-exec build/src/examples/media-session
+#exec build/src/examples/media-session

2. Second, you will need to run pipewire: in the pipewire source tree, do make run

3. Without stopping pipewire, in the wireplumber source tree, do make run

Testing with an audio client

The easiest way to test that things are working is to start a gstreamer pipeline that outputs a test sound to pipewire.

In the pipewire source tree, do:

$ make shell
$ gst-launch-1.0 audiotestsrc ! pwaudiosink

Note that pwaudiosink is currently only available in the agl-next branch.

It is also possible to easily test pulseaudio and jack audio clients with mplayer. For example, for pulse clients, do:

$ make shell
$ mplayer -ao pulse file.mp3

For jack clients, do:

$ make shell
$ mplayer -ao jack file.mp3

Note that pipewire-pulseaudio and pipewire-jack compatibility libraries from the pipewire project need to be installed.

Testing with a video client

Video capturing is also possible using the pipewiresrc gstreamer element, which is included by default when installing pipewire. You can capture video buffers from the default camera by doing the following:

$ make shell
$ gst-launch-1.0 pipewiresrc ! videoconvert ! ximagesink

Debugging

The Makefile included with WirePlumber also supports the gdb and valgrind targets. So, instead of make run you can do make gdb or make valgrind to do some debugging.

Getting debug messages on the command line is a matter of setting the G_MESSAGES_DEBUG environment variable as documented in the GLib documentation. Usually you can just do:

G_MESSAGES_DEBUG=all make run

Note that this only gives out WirePlumber's debug messages. If you want to also see libpipewire's debug messages, then you can also set:

PIPEWIRE_DEBUG=4 G_MESSAGES_DEBUG=all make run

... where PIPEWIRE_DEBUG can be set to a value between 1 and 5, with 5 being the most verbose and 1 the least verbose.