Immich in LXC

Install Immich in LXC with optional CUDA support. This guide should be appliable to any bare-metal installation.

Introduction

Immich is a

High performance self-hosted photo and video management solution

I really like Immich and its coherent experience in both mobile and web. However, the official Documents only provides Docker installation guide, which is less than ideal for a LXC user.

But, not providing a bare-metal installation guide for immich can be justified as Immich is more than a simple binary and does requires some efforts to set up in current state.

This guide is heavily inspired by another guide, Immich Native. KUDO to its author, arter97!

Immich Components

• Immich
  • Web Server
  • Microservices
  • Machine Learning Server
• Database
  • Redis
  • Postgresql
    • PG-vector
• System
  • ffmpeg
  • Node.js
  • git
• (Optional) Reverse Proxy
  • Nginx
• (Optional) NVIDIA
  • Driver
  • CuDNN (Version 8)

As one could tell, it is a lot of works, and a lot of things to get right. However, Immich is quite resilience and will fall-back to a baseline default when hardware-acceleration does not work.

For the simplicity of the guide, all the components are installed in a single LXC container. However, it is always possible to run different components in different LXC containers. It is always a design choice.

Host setup

I am using Proxmox VE 8 as the LXC host. It is based on Debian, and I have a NVIDIA GPU, including NVIDIA proprietary driver (550) installed.

Prepare the LXC container

For LXC container, it is recommend to use Ubuntu 22.04 LTS even though a newer LTS has been released. The reason is that the CuDNN shipped with the newer release is too advanced for the current Onnx GPU runtime, which machine learning component depends on (As for Immich Version 102.3). If one only plans to use CPU, it should not be a problem.

First, create a LXC normally. Make sure there is reasonable amount CPU and memory. Because we are going to install and compile a lot of things, it would not hurt to give it a bit more. For a CPU-only Immich server, there should be at least 8 GiB of storage, and a NVIDIA GPU one should have at least 16 GiB. Also, there is no need for a privileged container, if one does not plan to mount file system directly inside the LXC container.

Mount host volume to LXC container (Optional)

This part of the guide is about mounting a directory from the host to a unprivileged container. The directory can be a SMB or a NFS share that is already mounted on the host, or any other local directory.

Follow the guide at another repository of mine.

And, that is it, EZ, right?

NVIDIA go-brrrrrrrrrrr (NVIDIA GPU LXC pass-through) (Optional)

Follow the guide at another repository of mine.

After finishing all of the steps in that guide, the guest OS should execute command nvidia-smi without any error.

For immich machine learning support, we also need to install CuDNN,

apt install nvidia-cudnn

Zu easy, innit?

Install utilities and databases

apt install curl git python3-venv python3-dev

Postgresql

As for postgresql, visit official guide and install postgresql 16, as immich depends on a vector extension on version 16.

apt install -y postgresql-common
/usr/share/postgresql-common/pgdg/apt.postgresql.org.sh
apt -y install postgresql
apt install postgresql-pgvector

To prepare the database, we need to make some configuration.

First, we need to become user postgres, and connect to the database,

su postgres
psql

In the psql interface, we type in following SQL command,

CREATE DATABASE immich;
CREATE USER immich WITH ENCRYPTED PASSWORD 'A_SEHR_SAFE_PASSWORD';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE immich to immich;
ALTER USER immich WITH SUPERUSER;
\q # To exit

Note: change password.

FFmpeg

To install ffmpeg, it is recommend not to use the ffmpeg in the Ubuntu APT repo, because hardware acceleration is not enabled at the compile time of that version of FFmpeg, which should not matter for CPU-only user. Instead, a version from Jellyfin is recommended, because that version is well-maintained and receive active updates. Here is how this could be done. The following commands is mostly copy-and-paste from the official installation documentation.

First, we need to add the repository of Jellyfin to the system package manager.

apt install curl gnupg software-properties-common
add-apt-repository universe
mkdir -p /etc/apt/keyrings
curl -fsSL https://repo.jellyfin.org/jellyfin_team.gpg.key | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/keyrings/jellyfin.gpg
export VERSION_OS="$( awk -F'=' '/^ID=/{ print $NF }' /etc/os-release )"
export VERSION_CODENAME="$( awk -F'=' '/^VERSION_CODENAME=/{ print $NF }' /etc/os-release )"
export DPKG_ARCHITECTURE="$( dpkg --print-architecture )"
cat <<EOF | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/jellyfin.sources
Types: deb
URIs: https://repo.jellyfin.org/${VERSION_OS}
Suites: ${VERSION_CODENAME}
Components: main
Architectures: ${DPKG_ARCHITECTURE}
Signed-By: /etc/apt/keyrings/jellyfin.gpg
EOF
apt update

Then, we install the ffmpeg from Jellyfin.

apt install jellyfin-ffmpeg6

Finally, we soft link the Jellyfin ffmpeg to /bin/

ln -s /usr/lib/jellyfin/jellyfin-ffmpeg  /bin/ffmpeg
ln -s /usr/lib/jellyfin/jellyfin-ffprobe  /bin/ffprobe

Now, calling ffmpeg should output a long gibberish.

Alternative way of installing FFmpeg (Static build)

Download one from FFmpeg Static Builds.

wget https://johnvansickle.com/ffmpeg/builds/ffmpeg-git-amd64-static.tar.xz
tar -xf ffmpeg-git-amd64-static.tar.xz
cp ffmpeg-git-amd64-static/ffmpeg /bin/ffmpeg

Redis

Immich works fine with the Redis in Ubuntu 22.04 APT repo. No additional config is needed.

apt install redis

Node.js

Immich works on Node.js 20 LTS, and Ubuntu ships an ancient node.js. We need to go to Node.js's website for the desired version.

The following script is copy-pasted from the node.js's website. One should go to the website for the latest version of the code.

# installs NVM (Node Version Manager)
curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.39.7/install.sh | bash

# download and install Node.js
nvm install 20

# verifies the right Node.js version is in the environment
node -v # should print `v20.13.1`

# verifies the right NPM version is in the environment
npm -v # should print `10.5.2`

Now, we are ready to install the Immich server.

Install Immich Server

Create a immich user, if you already done so in the above optional section, you may safely skip the following code block.

useradd -m immich
chsh immich # Optional: Change the default shell the immich user is using.

After creating the user,