If you are running OS X or some other nix like OS you can use the GUI in which case you need to type your administrative password or you can go without the GUI in which case you need to manually point your browser to the correct location.
You can have both with these two collections of commands run at the command line. The first is to start up, the second to shut down. # STARTUP # First we launch web2py, assign password "test" and run on port 8000 # Then we save our PID (process ID) to a text file to use later when we want to shut down # Next we take a short snooze for dramatic effect and to make sure Web2py is up and running (2 seconds, not bad my friends....) # Finally we launch a new tab in Firefox with our website. The example here works for OS X, you can figure out what it is for your OS python web2py.py -a test -p 8000& # launch web2py as process in background echo $! > PID.TXT& # use $! var to get last PID started, save to file PID.TXT sleep 2 # take a short nap ...zzzzz open -a /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin http://127.0.0.1:8000/& # open firefox tab # SHUTDOWN # first we cat the contents of our PID.TXT file and send the output the the variable called "pid" # Next we run the kill command using the var containing our PID pid=`cat PID.TXT` # grab our web2py PID kill -KILL $pid # kill the PID