How do I manually start/stop the motion service from a program?

Question

I have successfully set up motion to run at boot up on a Raspberry Pi running buster Debian Linux.

Now I want to start and stop the service from within my Python program. I started by changing the /etc/default/motion file from start_motion_daemon=yes to start_motion_daemon=no and then rebooting, but the motion service was still automatically starting on boot. Then I ran

sudo systemctl disable motion

and rebooted. That worked. After this, I could successfully issue the command

sudo service motion start

from within my Python program via a subprocess.run() call and the service would start successfully. However, no motion capture occurred after this. Issuing the command

sudo service motion status

revealed a message saying No /usr/bin/motion.

Does anyone know how to properly do this?

Answer 1

I decided to abandon running motion as a service and use subprocess.Popen() from within my program to start and stop the motion application.