Action Buttons

What Are Action Buttons?

Starting with version 0.30, motionEye can be configured to overlay buttons on top of a camera frame. These buttons will then execute custom commands when clicked.

Available Actions

The following actions are defined:

• lock
• unlock
• light_on
• light_off
• alarm_on
• alarm_off

While the available actions are limited to the above set, the commands executed can be practically anything and have to be defined by the user.

Enabling Actions

motionEye will look inside its configuration folder (see conf path) for executable files named [action]_[cameraid], where action is one of the available actions (listed above) and cameraid is the id of the camera on top of which the action button will be displayed.

For example, on a setup using the default configuration, the presence of the executable file /etc/motioneye/unlock_1 tells motionEye to show an unlock button on top of camera number one. The file will be executed upon pressing the button. Buttons will have distinctive icons that correspond to the name of the action.

A Few Remarks

• When adding or removing these action files, you need to reload the application in your browser for the changes to take effect.
• Make sure the file is executable and has no extension.
• Action files can be symlinks, as long as they point to an executable file.
• No arguments are passed when executing the file; if you need to pass arguments to your commands, create a shell script as a wrapper around your command.
• The command should not block (at least not for a long period of time); action buttons are disabled during the execution of their commands.
• The output (stdout and stderr) will show up in motionEye's log file; if the command exits successfully (with code 0) the output will be logged as debug; otherwise it will show up as an error.