# 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.