What is motionEye?

motionEye is an online interface for the software motion, a video surveillance program with motion detection.

Check out the wiki for more details. Changelog is available on the releases page.

From version 0.43, motionEye is multilingual:

You can contribute to translations on Weblate.

Installation

(Docker images are provided on Docker Hub. See docker/README.md for further details.)

1. Install Python 3.9 or later and build dependencies

   Here, the commands for APT-based Linux distributions are given:

   sudo apt update
   sudo apt --no-install-recommends install ca-certificates curl python3-venv
   

   On ARMv6/ARMv7 (32-bit), RISC-V, and other rare CPU architectures, additional build dependencies may be required to compile the Pillow and CFFI modules:

   sudo apt --no-install-recommends install python3-dev gcc libjpeg62-turbo-dev libffi-dev
   

2. Create a Python virtual environment (venv) for motionEye

   sudo python3 -m venv --upgrade-deps /opt/motioneye
   

3. Install and setup motionEye

   sudo /opt/motioneye/bin/pip install motioneye
   sudo /opt/motioneye/bin/motioneye_init
   

   Uploads to Amazon S3 or another S3 service need the boto3 module, and SFTP uploads the PycURL module. They are not installed with motionEye by default, but can be added with the s3 and sftp extras:

   sudo /opt/motioneye/bin/pip install 'motioneye[s3,sftp]'
   

   motioneye_init sets up a systemd service with its main executable meyectl from the venv path, respectively the Python environment the called motioneye_init belongs to. A custom meyectl path can be given with --meyectl /path/to/meyectl.

   motioneye_init currently assumes either an APT- or RPM-based distribution with systemd as init system. For a manual setup, config and service files can be found here: https://github.com/motioneye-project/motioneye/tree/dev/motioneye/extra

4. Access the web interface

   After having successfully followed the installation instructions, the motionEye server should be running on your system and listening on port 8765. Fire up your favorite web browser and visit the following URL (replacing [your_ip] with... well, your system's IP address):

   http://[your_ip]:8765/
   

   Use the username admin with an empty password when prompted for credentials. Passwords must be set for both the admin and surveillance (view-only) user accounts when saving any configuration changes.

Upgrade

If motionEye was installed with sudo python3 -m pip install motioneye before, outside of a venv, uninstall it with sudo python3 -m pip uninstall motioneye, then follow the installation steps. Your configuration in /etc/motioneye is kept, and motioneye_init updates the systemd service.

When upgrading motionEye, remember to restart the service. To rule out any mix of old in-memory backend code with new frontend assets, it is recommended to stop it prior to the upgrade, and start it back up afterwards:

sudo systemctl stop motioneye
sudo /opt/motioneye/bin/pip install --upgrade motioneye
sudo systemctl start motioneye

Pre-releases

We may push beta versions to PyPI to give upcoming releases some testing period. Those can be installed with pip's --pre flag:

sudo systemctl stop motioneye
sudo /opt/motioneye/bin/pip install --upgrade --pre motioneye
sudo systemctl start motioneye

If you want to test a recent commit on our development branch:

sudo systemctl stop motioneye
sudo /opt/motioneye/bin/pip install --upgrade 'https://github.com/motioneye-project/motioneye/archive/dev.tar.gz'
sudo systemctl start motioneye