Immich

Taking videos at 4k, 60 fps? Worried about the ever accumulating storage on your photo service drive? There is now a legitimate, self hosted alternative!

Here's how we install Immich.

Prerequisites

Get Docker installed. Setup is quite fast, see my documentation.

Cloning Docker Container

After you have Docker installed it's quite simple (see the official documentation). Create a folder for where the docker container will go. I'm creating a folder within a docker folder where other Docker apps can also be stored. Then we'll also download the config files, which will enable Docker Compose to spin up the container.

mkdir ./docker/immich-app
cd ./docker/immich-app
wget https://github.com/immich-app/immich/releases/latest/download/docker-compose.yml
wget -O .env https://github.com/immich-app/immich/releases/latest/download/example.env
wget https://github.com/immich-app/immich/releases/latest/download/hwaccel.yml

Change the environmental variables

sudo nano .env

Here you can customize the upload location of photos on your server as well as the database password.

Abstract

# You can find documentation for all the supported env variables
# at https://immich.app/docs/install/environment-variables

# The location where your uploaded files are stored
UPLOAD_LOCATION=./library

# The Immich version to use. You can pin this to a specific version like "v1.71.0"
IMMICH_VERSION=release

# Connection secret for postgres. You should change it to a random password
DB_PASSWORD=postgres

# The values below this line do not need to be changed
##############################
DB_HOSTNAME=immich_postgres
DB_USERNAME=postgres
DB_DATABASE_NAME=immich

REDIS_HOSTNAME=immich_redis

Change the password

Add your own password to the .env file here DB_PASSWORD=postgres

Start the Container

docker compose up -d

You should now see the container running in Docker Desktop if you happened to install that as well.

Open the App

Immich runs on port 2283. If you are on Ubuntu Desktop you can access the website via

localhost:2283

Otherwise, if you are access it from another computer on the network, make sure you allow the port on the firewall.

sudo ufw allow 2283

Nginx Reverse Proxy

Let's set up Immich to be accessible from the world wide web!

Prerequisites

If you haven't already installed nginx or certbot, please follow my documentation before continuing to get those installed.

Set up an nginx server block

Let's configure a server block for photos.mydomain.com. Of course, you can replace mydomain with a domain that you own.

Let's make sure we're in the nginx site-available directory

cd /etc/nginx/sites-available

Create a server block for photos.<mydomain>.com.

sudo nano photos.mydomain.com

Paste the following configuration

server {
    listen 80;
    listen [::]:80;

    # replace with your domain or subdomain
    server_name photos.mydomain.com

    # https://github.com/immich-app/immich/blob/main/nginx/templates/default.conf.template#L28
    client_max_body_size 50000M;

    location / {
        proxy_pass http://localhost:2283;
        proxy_set_header Host              $http_host;
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP         $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For   $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;

        # http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/websocket.html
        proxy_http_version 1.1;
        proxy_set_header   Upgrade    $http_upgrade;
        proxy_set_header   Connection "upgrade";
        proxy_redirect off;
    }
}

Replace the domain

Just remember to replace photos.mydomain.com with the actual domain you want routed to Immich.

Save this file.

Enable the site.

sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/photos.mydomain.com /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/

Let's just test our nginx config real quick to make sure there were no syntax issues.

sudo nginx -t

Configure DNS Routing

Before we set up certbot, we need to configure routing for the domain or subdomain that we want to route to our home server.

For AWS users, simply go to Hosted Zones, choose the domain that you want to create a record for, and hit Create Record. In our example here, were are using a subdomain photos. The record will be a CNAME, which allows use to forward traffic to the DDNS we created with No-IP. Hit save. Now we have a CNAME routing for photos.mydomain.com which will forward traffic to our DDNS aka our home server.

Configure SSL (HTTPS)

Let's install our SSL certificates so that we make sure our site always uses HTTPS.

sudo certbot --nginx -d photos.mydomain.com

We should get a Congratulations! message from certbot.

Let's test our configuration once again.

sudo nginx -t

And now restart the nginx service.

sudo systemctl restart nginx

Testing

Excellent! We can now hit our Immich server from the world wide web!

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