User:Lcarsos/Music Player Daemon

Autostart with systemd

In recent versions of systemd (It seems to start at 207) the syntax for starting a service as a specific user changed. In 206 and before a user specific service could be enabled by systemctl --user enable service_name.service. The modern way is to call systemctl enable service_name@username.service.

The mpd package has not been updated. It provides a service file in /usr/lib/systemd/system/mpd.service. This file will work well for a global installation of mpd, but not for specific user instances. There is a symlink to that file at /usr/lib/systemd/user/mpd.service, but that is not useful.

Either make a copy of the service file to /etc/systemd/system/mpd@.service or move the file to /usr/lib/systemd/system/mpd@.service.

The configuration file ~/.mpdconf is expected to exist (otherwise the global /etc/mpd.conf is used). You should not use the user and group variables in the configuration file.

Tip: If you don't like the configuration file being in ~/.mpdconf, copy /usr/lib/systemd/system/mpd.service to ~/.config/systemd/user/mpd.service and edit it to contain the path of your configuration file:

~/.config/systemd/user/mpd.service

...
ExecStart=/usr/bin/mpd --no-daemon /path/to/your/mpd.conf
...

All you have to do is enable and start the user service:

$ systemctl --user enable mpd
$ systemctl --user start mpd

Note: Also make sure to disable every other method of starting mpd you used before.