AirPlay Watchdog plugin for Volumio 3 and 4
I’ve released a community plugin that monitors Volumio’s built-in AirPlay receiver (shairport-sync) and attempts to recover it if it crashes or becomes unhealthy.
Features
- Detects unexpected Shairport Sync crashes and failures
- Restarts AirPlay through Volumio’s normal AirPlay mechanism
- Avoids interrupting active AirPlay playback
- Recognises intentional stops and on-demand AirPlay behaviour
- Uses exponential backoff, restart limits and cooldown protection
- Verifies the receiver after restarting
- Optional Avahi/mDNS advertisement checking
- Provides restart status and history in the plugin UI
- Includes a manual Restart AirPlay Receiver button
- Cleans up timers and subprocesses when disabled
- Requires no additional sudo rules or custom network endpoints
The plugin uses conservative defaults, and the optional mDNS check is disabled by default.
Compatibility
- Volumio 3 and Volumio 4
- Tested for installation compatibility with Volumio 4.119.0
- Buster and Bookworm
- AMD64, ARMHF and i386
Installation
Enable SSH on your Volumio device, connect to it, and run:
cd /tmp
git clone https://github.com/jhscann/Volumio-restart-airplay.git
cd Volumio-restart-airplay
volumio plugin install
Accept the warning about installing an unverified community plugin.
After installation, open the Volumio interface and go to:
Plugins → Installed Plugins → AirPlay Watchdog → Enable
The configuration page provides the watchdog interval, automatic recovery, optional mDNS checking, status information and manual restart action.
Updating
cd /tmp/Volumio-restart-airplay
git pull
volumio plugin install
Source code and documentation
GitHub:
The repository includes architecture notes, testing instructions, diagnostic commands, permissions information and a safe rollback procedure.
This is an unofficial community plugin, so feedback and testing reports—particularly across different Volumio devices and versions—would be very welcome.