Running as a service¶
If you want to run Mopidy as a service using either an init script or a systemd service, there's a few differences from running Mopidy as your own user you'll want to know about. The following applies to Debian, Ubuntu, Raspbian, and Arch. Hopefully, other distributions packaging Mopidy will make sure this works the same way on their distribution.
Configuration¶
All configuration is in /etc/mopidy/mopidy.conf
, not in your user's
home directory.
mopidy user¶
The Mopidy service runs as the mopidy
user, which is automatically created
when you install the Mopidy package. The mopidy
user will need read access
to any local music you want Mopidy to play.
Subcommands¶
To run Mopidy subcommands with the same user and config files as the service
uses, you can use sudo mopidyctl <subcommand>
. In other words, where you'll
usually run:
mopidy config
You should instead run the following to inspect the service's configuration:
sudo mopidyctl config
The same applies to scanning your local music collection. Where you'll normally run:
mopidy local scan
You should instead run:
sudo mopidyctl local scan
Service management with systemd¶
On modern systems using systemd you can enable the Mopidy service by running:
sudo systemctl enable mopidy
This will make Mopidy start when the system boots.
Mopidy is started, stopped, and restarted just like any other systemd service:
sudo systemctl start mopidy
sudo systemctl stop mopidy
sudo systemctl restart mopidy
You can check if Mopidy is currently running as a service by running:
sudo systemctl status mopidy
Service management on Debian¶
On Debian systems (both those using systemd and not) you can enable the Mopidy service by running:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure mopidy
Mopidy can be started, stopped, and restarted using the service
command:
sudo service mopidy start
sudo service mopidy stop
sudo service mopidy restart
You can check if Mopidy is currently running as a service by running:
sudo service mopidy status
Service on OS X¶
If you're installing Mopidy on OS X, see Running Mopidy automatically on login.
Configure PulseAudio¶
When using PulseAudio, you will typically have a PulseAudio server run by your main user. Since Mopidy is running as its own user, it can't access this server directly. Running PulseAudio as a system-wide daemon is discouraged by upstream (see here for details). Rather you can configure PulseAudio and Mopidy so Mopidy sends the sound to the PulseAudio server already running as your main user.
First, configure PulseAudio to accept sound over TCP from localhost by
uncommenting or adding the TCP module to /etc/pulse/default.pa
or
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/pulse/default.pa
(typically
~/.config/pulse/default.pa
):
### Network access (may be configured with paprefs, so leave this commented
### here if you plan to use paprefs)
#load-module module-esound-protocol-tcp
load-module module-native-protocol-tcp auth-ip-acl=127.0.0.1
#load-module module-zeroconf-publish
Next, configure Mopidy to use this PulseAudio server:
[audio]
output = pulsesink server=127.0.0.1
After this, restart both PulseAudio and Mopidy:
pulseaudio --kill
start-pulseaudio-x11
sudo systemctl restart mopidy
If you are not running any X server, run pulseaudio --start
instead of
start-pulseaudio-x11
.
If you don't want to hard code the output in your Mopidy config, you can
instead of adding any config to Mopidy add this to
~mopidy/.pulse/client.conf
:
default-server=127.0.0.1