Sunshine

This page is intended to explain how to use Sunshine, an open-source implementation of NVIDIA’s GameStream protocol.

Install

To install Sunshine and enable it you can use the following snippet:

❄︎ /etc/nixos/configuration.nix

  services.sunshine = {
    enable = true;
    autoStart = true;
    capSysAdmin = true; # only needed for Wayland -- omit this when using with Xorg
    openFirewall = true;
  };

Connecting to the host

When installed via the NixOS module, Sunshine is configured as a Systemd user unit, and will start automatically on login to a graphical session. Note that a logout/login or restart may be required for Sunshine to start after initially adding it to your configuration due to limitations of NixOS' handling of user units with nixos-rebuild.

If services.sunshine.autoStart is set to false, Sunshine needs to be started with the sunshine command.

You may have to manually add the host running Sunshine to your Moonlight client. This, thankfully, is not hard to do.

Simply press the button that says Add Host Manually, from there you will need to input the following (replace <Host IP> with your Host’s IP address):

<Host IP>:47989

If this doesn’t work you should double check the port in the Sunshine’s WebGUI. You can access this from the Host PC in a web browser https://localhost:47990

Limitations

At the time of writing Sunshine is unable to wake sleeping display (e.g. when screen is locked), which makes impossible to connect to the main session of your host PC. Can be somehow avoided by creating a virtual display and running Sunshine through it.

Troubleshooting

Running Steam Big Picture on Wayland

While using Wayland on non-wlroots compositors, you need to have capSysAdmin = true; in Sunshine config for KMS to capture screen properly. But this parameter breaks any custom applications that should be started from your main user, not super-user. To avoid such issues, you need to prepend all needed commands with sudo -u <username> :

Before:

    {
      "name": "Steam Big Picture",
      "detached": [
        "setsid steam steam://open/bigpicture"
      ],
      "prep-cmd": [
        {
          "do": "",
          "undo": "setsid steam steam://close/bigpicture"
        }
      ],
      "image-path": "steam.png"
    }

After:

    {
      "name": "Steam Big Picture",
      "detached": [
        "sudo -u venya setsid steam steam://open/bigpicture"
      ],
      "prep-cmd": [
        {
          "do": "",
          "undo": "sudo -u venya setsid steam steam://close/bigpicture"
        }
      ],
      "image-path": "steam.png"
    }