Installing libcamera from source on docker container succeeds but cannot import libcamera into python

[habjoel]

Hey there,
I am trying to get libcamera to work inside my docker container that is based on the arm64v8/python3.9-bullseye docker image. My ultimate goal is to get libcamera working inside a docker container on my Raspberry Pi CM4.

I have gone through the installation steps specified here. and I used the following options with meson:

meson build --buildtype=release -Dpipelines=raspberrypi -Dipas=raspberrypi -Dv4l2=true -Dgstreamer=enabled -Dtest=false -Dcam=enabled -Dqcam=disabled -Dpycamera=enabled

The installation did not throw any errors and I built the python bindings by enabling pycamera. However I cannot really import libcamera into my python. import libcamera somehow only works if I am under root directory (/) and I cannot import any submodules such as from libcamera import controls throws an ImportError: cannot import name 'controls' from 'libcamera' (unknown location). From every other location nothing works (ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'libcamera'). Moreover, I can only find the header files of libcamera under /usr/local/include but no source files are under /usr/local/src. Also, it doesn't show the libcamera package if I search for it using dpkg -l | grep libcamera

Does anyone have a clue how to solve this? Obviously, I installed everything as a root user as this is the default inside Docker containers. Is that a problem? Moreover, I am using a python 3.9 specific docker image so this should be the only python inside the container.

Thank you for any help!

[kbingham]

I'm not sure what the python search paths are. Google to find out how to print those on your system, then match up where you're installing the libcamera package.
On a build here for instance it's gone to :

• /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/python3.10/site-packages/libcamera

You might want to add -Dprefix=/usr on your build to install to /usr or add /usr/local/lib/..... to your python search paths.

[habjoel]

thanks a lot. It worked by adding -Dprefix=/usr and adding /usr/lib/aarch64-linux-gnu/python3.9/site-packages/ to my python path.
In addition, I need to use picamera2. I installed it onto my docker container using pip install picamera2. The resulting version is 0.3.9. As I import it into python (import picamera2), it throws the following error:

ImportError: cannot import name 'convert_from_libcamera_type' from 'picamera2.utils' (/usr/local/lib/python3.9/site-packages/picamera2/utils/__init__.py)

Might there be some kind of version mismatch between picamera2 and libcamera?

Thanks for any help!

[kbingham]

I was going to reply to say if you're having issues with picamera2 - it's better to ask on that project. It's separate, but it looks like you already have!

Sounds like you've worked out the issue over there so closing this.