Install On Debian

Before Proceeding

• Read the general Installation page first.
• These instructions apply to Debian and Debian-based distributions. For Ubuntu and Raspbian however, you should check out their specific instructions.
• All commands require root; use sudo before each command or become root using su -.
• Install instructions confirmed as of 26 Sep 2021 on Debian 10 (Buster).

Instructions

1. Skip this step for Debian 9 or newer. For older Debian versions, you'll need to add the following repo to your apt sources, replacing [name] with wheezy (Debian 7) or jessie (Debian 8). This is required for ffmpeg:

    echo "deb http://www.deb-multimedia.org [name] main non-free" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
    apt-get update
    apt-get install deb-multimedia-keyring
    apt-get update     # yes, again
   

2. Install motion, ffmpeg and v4l-utils:

    apt-get install motion ffmpeg v4l-utils -y
    systemctl stop motion
    systemctl disable motion
   

   note: Precompiled binaries of motion can be found here, if you're not happy with what you find in the official Debian repos.

3. Install the dependencies from the repositories:

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

   note: Python 2.7 is required. If your system still runs Python 2.6 or older, please upgrade.

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

    pip install motioneye
   

   note: If pillow installation fails, you can try installing it from official repos using apt-get install python-pillow.

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:

   • Debian 7, sysvinit-based:

       cp /usr/local/share/motioneye/extra/motioneye.init-debian /etc/init.d/motioneye
       chmod +x /etc/init.d/motioneye
       update-rc.d -f motioneye defaults
       /etc/init.d/motioneye start
     

   • Debian 8 and newer, systemd-based:

       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, after it has been released, just issue:

        pip install motioneye --upgrade
   
   **note** that will update all the other required dependecies
   

   • Debian 7 or earlier:

       service motioneye restart
     

   • Debian 8 or later:

       systemctl restart motioneye