Motion-daemon: /var/log/motion/motion.log permission denied

https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/78715/motion-daemon-var-log-motion-motion-log-permission-denied

Motion-daemon: /var/log/motion/motion.log permission denied

 

 

 

 

I have installed the motion package on my pi (stretch). If I start motion in the foreground it's working but when I try to start it as a daemon it fails with the following log message:

motion: permission denied for /var/log/motion/motion.log

I've seen many approaches to fix this problem by tinkering with the permissions of /var/log/... but this does not convince me.

Q What's the correct way to fix this problem?

Update

I've motion installed as a service and I start it for testing with

sudo service motion start

but even then it fails with the error message below

raspberrypi motion[323]: [0:motion] [ERR] [ALL] myfopen: Error opening file /var/log/motion/motion.log with mode a: Permission denied

motion

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edited Feb 2, 2018 at 16:28

 

asked Feb 2, 2018 at 7:40

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Gotcha! For testing I started motion with sudo motion -b. Therefore, /var/log/motion/motion.log was written with root:root. After removing /var/log/motion and reboot, the motion-daemon was up and running and had the permission to write to the log.

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answered Feb 2, 2018 at 20:53

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•  
  Same thing happened to me. I think this should be the accepted answer. After removing the /var/log/motion directory, restart the service using sudo service motion restart and it works correctly. 

  – jontsai

   Oct 20, 2018 at 3:05
•  
  Same thing happened to me. Had to sudo rm -fr /var/log/motion then restart the service and now the right owner/group shows on that folder. 

  – Josh P

   Jan 4, 2020 at 15:22 
•  
  This isn't working for me. The directory doesn't get created after a reboot and I get the same error with after sudo service motion restart 

  – NickG

   Apr 8 at 8:40
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  @NickG You need to remove /var/log/motion (i.e. sudo rm -r /var/log/motion) at first and then reboot. 

  – participant

   Apr 19 at 15:40

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6

There are three ways to fix the problem. All are really the same, just from different angles. That is to make sure that the user starting motion has the access permission to write into the /var/log/motion/ directory. First could just make that user the owner of the directory. And give the owner write access. The second would be start the daemon using root by using the sudo command. An alternative third method is to allow write access to the log directory for a group 'motion' and to make that a supplementary group of any user needing to be able to start the daemon.

E.g. Assuming you want to create group motion and add user pi

pi@raspberrypi:~$sudo groupadd motion pi@raspberrypi:~$sudo usermod -aG motion pi

Finally change the ownership and permission of the /var/log/motion directory

pi@raspberrypi:~$cd /var/log pi@raspberrypi:/var/log $ chown root:motion motion pi@raspberrypi:/var/log $ chmod 664 motion

It is simpler and more normal to start the daemon as the root user who should already have all the correct permissions by using sudo command as I already mentioned.

 

 

>reboot

>sudo service motion restart