openrazer-daemon(8)

💖 openrazer-daemon — the manual page bestie 💖

okay so like. this is the man page for openrazer-daemon from the System Manager's Manual (section 8, the sysadmin-y corner of the man-page universe), and honestly? she's iconic. let's get into it 🫶

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✨ NAME ✨

openrazer-daemon — the daemon that manages ur Razer devices in userspace 💅

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

openrazer-daemon [options...]

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✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

so openrazer-daemon is a userspace service that's basically the group chat between ur userspace programs and the Razer drivers 🌸 she's the intermediary, the middle bestie, the one relaying messages so nobody has to talk to each other directly. what she does is hand out some higher-level functions so u can do stuff that feels a lot like what the Windows Razer Synapse program does. and she's designed to be started by xdg-autostart as a session service, so she just shows up when u log in, no cap 🌈

the service has the range, fr fr — she can:

• 🔄 sync effects between multiple devices
• 🎬 do on-the-fly macro recording and playback
• ⌨️ reimplement the FN+Keys logic so those keys actually work when macro_keys are enabled
• 🌊 pull off various ripple effects
• 😴 turn off the devices when the screensaver is active

⚠️ important note bestie: every path shown as a default — think ~/.local/share/ or ~/.config/ — can be changed with the XDG Base Directory specification variables: $XDG_CONFIG_HOME, $XDG_DATA_HOME, and $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR. so if u want ur stuff living somewhere else, the XDG vars said "say less" 💜

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✨ OPTIONS ✨

• -v, --verbose — turns on logging of DEBUG messages. she's telling u everything, no filter, we love a transparent queen 💀
• -F, --foreground — run the daemon in the foreground and don't fork. this ALSO sends the log output to stdout (on top of the log file, not instead of it). two places, because she can ✨
• -r, --respawn — stop any running daemon first (if one's running) before starting. out with the old, in with the new 🔥
• -s, --stop — gracefully stop the running daemon. no drama, just a polite exit 🎀
• --as-root — allows the daemon to be started as root. (yeah. as root. be careful bestie, root is main character energy and root does not play 🙈)
• --config=_config_file_ — specifies the location of the config file. if u don't provide one it defaults to ~/.config/openrazer/razer.conf, and it'll create it if needed from the example config 💖
• --persistence=_persistence_file_ — specifies the location of the persistence file. this gets created if it doesn't exist yet. it's where device states are stored so they persist between reboots — ur settings don't ghost u after a restart, periodt 👑
• --run-dir=_run_directory_ — tells the daemon what directory is her run directory, i.e. the directory she'll chdir into once started. defaults to $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR; if that isn't set, she falls back to ~/.local/share/openrazer/ 🌸
• --log-dir=_log_directory_ — this argument decides where the log directory lives. the daemon handles log rotation herself since she's a user session service (independent queen 💅). she defaults to ~/.local/share/openrazer/logs/ for her log directory.
• --test-dir=_test_dir_ — if u provide this, the daemon runs in test-driver mode, where she exposes devices that aren't physically connected 🦋 (fake it till u make it, literally). use scripts/create_fake_device.py or scripts/setup_fake_devices.sh from the source repository to build the directory structure.

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✨ DOCUMENTATION ✨

the full and most up-to-date documentation lives on the GitHub repo at https://github.com/openrazer/openrazer — go read it, iykyk 📚💜

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✨ SEE ALSO ✨

• razer.conf(5) — go read that one too bestie, they're a package deal 🫶

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okay that's the whole page!! tysm for reading, ur literally doing great 🌈✨ this was openrazer-daemon(8) from the System Manager's Manual, dated 2026-03-10 — mwah, love that for us, go sync some effects 💖🎀🦋