A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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The absolute irony... I've used Immich for nearly 2 years without fail; it's never skipped a beat. Today I update to the stable release and my Immich mobile app now has a sync error warning. This is the first issue I've ever had.
EDIT: Phew! Clear File Cache in mobile app has sorted the error. For a moment I thought the universe was against me.
Yeah i cleared data and relogged. It's just easier that way lol
No such trouble for me, thank goodness
God damnit, now I need to set up k8s and install it.
I've been putting off moving out of Google photos for years. No, no, I shouldn't spend the time to host it. It has that scary banner.
Way to ruin my weekend! /s
Congrats Immich Team! /and if you're listening, thanks!
I was going to finally do k0/k3 or something kubernetes to set it up. I managed to get it going scalable with just docker swarm. So the kubernetes procrastination survived another deployment!
K8s prob overkill if it's just you and your family
K8s is pretty cheap for fault tolerance
Two VM's and two Pi
If my wife decides whe wants to watch the wedding video or the kids first TKD break and it's down, she'll clamor to move back to Google/Apple. I can also move my piholes over there and some of my arr stack.
Resillient hosting for zero cost is pretty hot.
If fault tolerance is what you're looking for I'd suggest a minipc over a pi, specced higher for the same cost and muuuch more reliable long term in my experience
The nodes go on x86. You use the pi's for control planes. They sit around doing pretty much nothing until a pod get's wrecked or upgraded then they spin a new one. You use 3's or 4's clocked down to save power.
You really only need one, but for $50 two gives your fault tolerance, fault tolerance.
Ok I’ll ask. I’ve been doing containers for a while now. My day job is in virtualization/networking/storage so this shouldn’t be that hard. But I just can’t get my head around kubernetes. Between work and home I have enough hardware to choke a robotic horse so that shouldn’t be a problem. Are there any good resources to get me started?
When I started with it, I looked through references all over and just felt f'ing lost, and I do this kind of stuff all the time. I am intimately familiar with AWS and Azure, but setting K8S up is just very different than the normal stuff we're used to. I'm big on installing a package and screwing with it until it works, but this doesn't work like that.
At the risk of being criticized here, and I'm very sorry if you're strongly opposed to AI, consider asking ChatGPT or Copilot to guide you through setting up Kubernetes step by step. Out of desperation, I figured I'd give AI a shot, and for the most part, it was really great at teaching it to me.
Ask it to give you the different options for setting up Kubernetes on your home lab (there are numerous ways to do this). You can save a lot of steps by using something like Rancher (k3s), which is a simplified version, but I prefer starting with the official kubeadm first. It's harder, but it gives you a better feel for what's happening, and it's more capable and closer to what you'd experience when crafting a production deployment.
Indicate your level of experience in the next prompt and specify which systems you're familiar with so it can tailor training to your existing knowledge and play to your strengths. Ask it to make a lesson plan first, and then pick what items you want it to walk you through. If anything feels weird or you have questions, stop it and ask away. You're working on something from scratch, so there's little to lose if it gets something wrong, but honestly, teaching technical things with tons of documentation available is probably the best use of LLMs that has ever existed.
If you decide against AI, focus your research on Docker cli, Kubeadm installation (the control plane/controller) and creating/joining nodes, persistent storeage and networking, K8S Namespace, then pod deployment. Complicated parts that might hang you up are getting logs from PODS that die on startup, and getting interactive prompts in a cluster are a little different than Docker (have to specify namespace)
For persistent storage, you then have numerous options. For a homelab, I like Longhorn; it's a RAID-like system that stores data blocks across the nodes, and it easily backs up to S3 if you want it to.
For homelab learning and testing, I just crapped out a Proxmox and started 3 VMs, setup kubeadm on the control plane and then joined two nodes, then spent I an hour getting NTFY to run in it for the first time, I really should have done a python hello world, NTFY is fiddly. But, it's super fun to stop a VM and watch the app come back up like nothing happened.
Once you get a base system up, whatever you choose, do check out https://www.ansibleforkubernetes.com/
Jeff Geerling did a bang-up job on the book, and it supports his cause. It just doesn't go into the detail you need to get started with k8s.
Two nodes doesn't provide quorum
Whew… I was thinking it may have been a requirement now.
There's a really nice Google Take-Out parser for immich that will preserve all your meta data during import. It was kind of a dream to use, it worked so smoothly.
In my case, I moved about 100k photos and videos, and I'm still periodically finding old flash drives and SD cards laying around that were never imported, so im using the migration to catch up on decades of photo archival. So far, all good.
If you have linux on machine(s) k3s/rke2 is pretty easy to get going.
Why are their official communities on Reddit and Discord? Why not a Mastodon or Lemmy community?
I was planning on starting to host my own Immich server for my family. Like I did for other futo projects, I paid, even if there is no technical reason to. Does anyone know what the "sever key"/"client key" thing is? I'm imagining that a client key is what goes in the immich android app, and a server key is what goes in ther server admin console?
The thing is that if I want to be considered as someone who uses FOSS ethically - and I'm hosting for my family - I don't want each of them to purchase a client key.... In my eyes - purchasing a server key in that price should at least give me some leeway, and the small number of clients I plan on supporting would not be considered unlicensed...
It does https://immich.app/blog/immich-product-keys
But as far as I understand the key doesn't really go anywhere, it's just a fancy way to suggest a donation. (And there's nothing unethical about using FOSS without paying or contributing back in any way)
Only missing the workflows for my family to adopt it!