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Building and installing Moonfire NVR manually

This guide will walk you through building and installing Moonfire NVR manually. You should have already downloaded the source code as mentioned in install.md, and after completing these instructions you should go back to that page to complete configuration.

Building from source

There are no binary packages of Moonfire NVR available yet, so it must be built from source.

Moonfire NVR is written in the Rust Programming Language. In the long term, I expect this will result in a more secure, full-featured, easy-to-install software.

You will need the following C libraries installed:

ffmpeg version 2.x or 3.x, including libavutil, libavcodec (to inspect H.264 frames), and libavformat (to connect to RTSP servers and write .mp4 files).

Note ffmpeg library versions older than 55.1.101, along with all versions of the competing project libav, don't support socket timeouts for RTSP. For reliable reconnections on error, it's strongly recommended to use ffmpeg library versions >= 55.1.101.
SQLite3.
ncursesw, the UTF-8 version of the ncurses library.

On recent Ubuntu or Raspbian, the following command will install all non-Rust dependencies:

$ sudo apt-get install \
               build-essential \
               libavcodec-dev \
               libavformat-dev \
               libavutil-dev \
               libncurses5-dev \
               libncursesw5-dev \
               libsqlite3-dev \
               libssl-dev \
               pkgconf \
               tzdata

Next, you need Rust 1.31+ and Cargo. The easiest way to install them is by following the instructions at rustup.rs.

Finally, building the UI requires yarn.

Once prerequisites are installed, Moonfire NVR can be built as follows:

$ yarn
$ yarn build
$ cargo test
$ cargo build --release
$ sudo install -m 755 target/release/moonfire-nvr /usr/local/bin
$ sudo mkdir /usr/local/lib/moonfire-nvr
$ sudo cp -R ui-dist /usr/local/lib/moonfire-nvr/ui

Creating the user and database

You can create Moonfire NVR's dedicated user and SQLite database with the following commands:

$ sudo addgroup --system moonfire-nvr
$ sudo adduser --system moonfire-nvr --home /var/lib/moonfire-nvr
$ sudo mkdir /var/lib/moonfire-nvr
$ sudo chown moonfire-nvr:moonfire-nvr /var/lib/moonfire-nvr
$ sudo -u moonfire-nvr -H mkdir db sample
$ sudo -u moonfire-nvr moonfire-nvr init

System Service

Moonfire NVR can be run as a systemd service. Create /etc/systemd/system/moonfire-nvr.service:

[Unit]
Description=Moonfire NVR
After=network-online.target

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/moonfire-nvr run \
    --db-dir=/var/lib/moonfire-nvr/db \
    --http-addr=0.0.0.0:8080
Environment=TZ=:/etc/localtime
Environment=MOONFIRE_FORMAT=google-systemd
Environment=MOONFIRE_LOG=info
Environment=RUST_BACKTRACE=1
Type=simple
User=moonfire-nvr
Nice=-20
Restart=on-abnormal
CPUAccounting=true
MemoryAccounting=true
BlockIOAccounting=true

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Note that the HTTP port currently has no authentication, encryption, or logging; it should not be directly exposed to the Internet.

Tell systemd to look for the new file:

$ sudo systemctl daemon-reload

See the systemd documentation for more information. The manual pages for systemd.service and systemctl may be of particular interest.

Don't enable or start the service just yet; you'll need to do some more configuration first.

Completing installation

After the steps on this page, go back to Downloading, installing, and configuring Moonfire NVR to set up the sample file directory and configure the system.

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