# What is motionEye?

**motionEye** is an online interface for the software [_motion_](https://motion-project.github.io/), a video surveillance program with motion detection.

Check out the [__wiki__](https://github.com/motioneye-project/motioneye/wiki) for more details. Changelog is available on the [__releases page__](https://github.com/motioneye-project/motioneye/releases).

From version 0.43, **motionEye** is multilingual:

| [![](https://hosted.weblate.org/widgets/motioneye-project/-/287x66-black.png)<br>![](https://hosted.weblate.org/widgets/motioneye-project/-/multi-auto.svg)](https://hosted.weblate.org/engage/motioneye-project/) |
| -: |

You can contribute to translations on [__Weblate__](https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/motioneye-project).

# Installation

1. Install **Python 3.7 or later** and build dependencies

    _Here the commands for APT-based Linux distributions are given._

    Thanks to pre-compiled wheels from PyPI, installing motionEye usually does not require anything but Python 3 and cURL with the ability to do HTTPS network requests:

    ```sh
    sudo apt update
    sudo apt --no-install-recommends install ca-certificates curl python3
    ```

    On **ARMv6/ARMv7 (32-bit), RISC-V, and other rare CPU architectures** additional build dependencies may be required to compile the [Pillow](https://pypi.org/project/pillow/), [PycURL](https://pypi.org/project/pycurl/), and [CFFI](https://github.com/python-cffi/cffi) modules:

    ```sh
    sudo apt --no-install-recommends install python3-dev gcc libjpeg62-turbo-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libssl-dev libffi-dev
    ```

2. Install the Python package manager `pip`

    ```sh
    curl -sSfO 'https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py'
    sudo python3 get-pip.py
    rm get-pip.py
    ```

    **On recent distro versions, like Debian 12/Bookworm, Ubuntu 23.04/Lunar, and later**, the `libpython3.*-stdlib` package ships a file `/usr/lib/python3.*/EXTERNALLY-MANAGED`, which prevents the installation of Python modules outside of `venv` environments.
    motionEye however has a small number of dependencies with no strict version requirements and hence is very unlikely to break any Python package you might have installed via APT. To bypass this block, add `break-system-packages=true` to the `[global]` section of your `pip.conf`:

    ```sh
    grep -q '\[global\]' /etc/pip.conf 2> /dev/null || printf '%b' '[global]\n' | sudo tee -a /etc/pip.conf > /dev/null
    sudo sed -i '/^\[global\]/a\break-system-packages=true' /etc/pip.conf
    ```

3. Install and setup **motionEye**

    ```sh
    sudo python3 -m pip install motioneye
    sudo motioneye_init
    ```

    _NB: `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 usernamme _admin_ with empty password when prompted for credentials. For security, __please do set up a proper password for the admin user__, at least if you plan to make your motionEye installation accessible from the Internet.

# Upgrade

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:

```sh
sudo systemctl stop motioneye
sudo python3 -m 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:

```sh
sudo systemctl stop motioneye
sudo python3 -m pip install --upgrade --pre motioneye
sudo systemctl start motioneye
```

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

```sh
sudo systemctl stop motioneye
sudo python3 -m pip install --upgrade 'https://github.com/motioneye-project/motioneye/archive/dev.tar.gz'
sudo systemctl start motioneye
```
