How to run systemctl service as user

Question

I'm trying to get mpd running as a server. When I ncpmpc, I see no songs. This is probably because mpd does not have access to my music folder.

Here is my folder:

drwxrwxrwx  4 pi            pi                4096 Jun  2 01:23 Music

Here is some of it's content

-rwxrwxrwx 1 pi            pi            10624841 Jun  2 01:23 Coldplay - Adventure Of A Lifetime .mp3
drwxr-xr-x 2 pi            pi                4096 Jun  2 01:19 Coldplay - The Best Songs (2016)

Mpd is running as a service, I have tried running sudo mpd but then I get this error

socket: Failed to bind to '0.0.0.0:6600': Address already in use

I'm thinking it's because mpd is already running. I also tried this, to stop it:

sudo systemctl stop mpd

but get this, so maybe that's what stopping sudo mpd from running.

Warning: Stopping mpd.service, but it can still be activated by:
  mpd.socket

This is all a bit confusing for me. I would prefer to run mpd as a service, but don't know what the permissions has to be for that to work. And how to set them up.

Answer 1

What you can do is to make it into a "user service" by creating an mpd.service in ~/.local/share/systemd/user/ and you can enable and start the service by running the following commands without root:

$ systemctl --user enable mpd.service
$ systemctl --user start mpd.service

The service will start running as your user.