Local web server for backyard camera

Overview

  • This is similar to allowing access to Motion, except that motion creates files which are served by a web server instead of motion serving them itself.
  • The main advantage over allowing access to Motion itself is that webservers are more ‘battle-tested’ with respect to remote access flaws.
  • See below for notes on security, port forwarding, and/or PageKite.
  • We don’t discuss the webserver configuration here as there are many guides already available for that.
  • For the copymotion script below it is assumed that the directory from which the web server is configured to serve the files is /var/www/html/motion and that is writable by the motion user. You should adapt the script as appropriate if you configure the web server with a different directory.
  • We further assume that the rclone ‘remote’ is called localweb for this server.

Configuring upload

A copymotion script for copying to a local web server directory when using the above autocopy configuration on /etc/motion/motion.conf

Copy this script to /usr/local/bin/copymotion

#!/bin/sh

( rclone copy /var/lib/motion/data localweb:/var/www/html/motion & )

NB This script assumes you have configured the destination for videos and photos to be /var/lib/motion/data NOT /var/lib/motion (which is the default). This is because the rclone config lives in /var/lib/motion/.config and we do not want to copy it to the web server.

See Also