Install On Raspbian Buster or earlier

Before Proceeding

• Read the general Installation page first.
• These instructions apply only to an up-to-date Raspbian Buster or earlier.
• All commands require root; use sudo before each command or become root using sudo -i.
• If you want to use the CSI camera module for the Raspberry PI, make sure you have enabled it in raspi-config.
• Installation instructions confirmed on RaspberryPiOS 20210507 Lite (Buster), on 10/23/2021
• Installation instructions confirmed on RaspberryPiOS 20210507 Full Desktop (Buster), on 10/23/2021

Instructions

1. Install ffmpeg and other motion dependencies:

    apt-get install ffmpeg libmariadb3 libpq5 libmicrohttpd12 -y
   

2. Install motion:

    wget https://github.com/Motion-Project/motion/releases/download/release-4.2.2/pi_buster_motion_4.2.2-1_armhf.deb 
    dpkg -i pi_buster_motion_4.2.2-1_armhf.deb 
   

   note: Raspbian Buster comes with motion version 4.1; it is however recommended that you install version 4.2, as indicated above

3. Install the dependencies from the repositories:

    apt-get install python-pip python-dev libssl-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libjpeg-dev libz-dev -y
   

4. Install motioneye, which will automatically pull Python dependencies (tornado, jinja2, pillow and pycurl):

    pip install motioneye
   

   note: If pillow installation fails (hangs and ends at 99%),
   you can install it from official repos using
   apt-get install python-pil -y
   and rerun
   pip install motioneye.

5. Prepare the configuration directory:

    mkdir -p /etc/motioneye
    cp /usr/local/share/motioneye/extra/motioneye.conf.sample /etc/motioneye/motioneye.conf
   

6. Prepare the media directory:

    mkdir -p /var/lib/motioneye
   

7. Add an init script, configure it to run at startup and start the motionEye server:

    cp /usr/local/share/motioneye/extra/motioneye.systemd-unit-local /etc/systemd/system/motioneye.service
    systemctl daemon-reload
    systemctl enable motioneye
    systemctl start motioneye
   

8. To upgrade to the newest version of motionEye, just issue:

    pip install motioneye --upgrade
    systemctl restart motioneye