Running in a terminal

For most users, it is probably preferable to run Mopidy as a service so that Mopidy is automatically started when your system starts.

The primary use case for running Mopidy manually in a terminal is that you’re developing on Mopidy or a Mopidy extension yourself, and are interested in seeing the log output all the time and to be able to quickly start and restart Mopidy.

Starting

To start Mopidy manually, simply open a terminal and run:

mopidy

For a complete reference to the Mopidy commands and their command line options, see mopidy command.

You can also get some help directly in the terminal by running:

mopidy --help

Stopping

To stop Mopidy, press CTRL+C in the terminal where you started Mopidy.

Mopidy will also shut down properly if you send it the TERM signal to the Mopidy process, e.g. by using pkill in another terminal:

pkill mopidy

Configuration

When running Mopidy for the first time, it’ll create a configuration file for you, usually at ~/.config/mopidy/mopidy.conf.

The ~ in the file path automatically expands to your home directory. If your username is alice and you are running Linux, the config file will probably be at /home/alice/.config/mopidy/mopidy.conf.

As this might vary slightly from system to system, you can check the first few lines of output from Mopidy to confirm the exact location:

INFO     2019-12-21 23:17:31,236 [20617:MainThread] mopidy.config
  Loading config from builtin defaults
INFO     2019-12-21 23:17:31,237 [20617:MainThread] mopidy.config
  Loading config from command line options
INFO     2019-12-21 23:17:31,239 [20617:MainThread] mopidy.internal.path
  Creating dir file:///home/jodal/.config/mopidy
INFO     2019-12-21 23:17:31,240 [20617:MainThread] mopidy.config
  Loading config from builtin defaults
INFO     2019-12-21 23:17:31,241 [20617:MainThread] mopidy.config
  Loading config from command line options
INFO     2019-12-21 23:17:31,249 [20617:MainThread] mopidy.internal.path
  Creating file file:///home/jodal/.config/mopidy/mopidy.conf
INFO     2019-12-21 23:17:31,249 [20617:MainThread] mopidy.__main__
  Initialized /home/jodal/.config/mopidy/mopidy.conf with default config

To print Mopidy’s effective configuration, i.e. the combination of defaults, your configuration file, and any command line options, you can run:

mopidy config

This will print your full effective config with passwords masked out so that you safely can share the output with others for debugging.