Installing PhotoPrism on Debian

Background

What is PhotoPrism?

PhotoPrism is a self-hosted web application for managing and organising a photo collection. It aims to provide many of the popular features of cloud services like Google Photos.

Why this guide?

The PhotoPrism documentation only covers Docker as an officially supported installation method. However, not everyone can, or wants to, use Docker. The only guide that covers installation without Docker is focused on development, and includes steps that are not necessary when one simply wants to run PhotoPrism.

The purpose of this guide, therefore, is to provide instructions for setting up a usable PhotoPrism installation on Debian. The guide has been written for, and tested on, Debian 11 "Bullseye", but should also work on older versions like Debian 10 "Buster", as well as derivatives like Ubuntu and Raspbian.

DISCLAIMER

This guide is provided in good faith and for informational purposes only. No claims are made or guarantees given that it will work on any particular combination of hardware and software, or that it will be kept up-to-date with new releases of PhotoPrism. You will assume all responsibility for managing your PhotoPrism server, including the prevention of unauthorised access and safeguards against data loss.

Installing PhotoPrism

Prerequisites

If you haven't done so already, ensure your server's packages are up-to-date:

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt upgrade

Next, a few packages need to be installed, these are mostly various helpers for installing PhotoPrism:

$ sudo apt install -y gcc g++ git gnupg make zip unzip

Note: If running in an environment where you're root by default, like in an LXC container, make sure sudo is installed, it'll be needed in a later step.

Node.js

While Node.js is available in Debian (and Ubuntu) repos, the version there is pretty old. Nodesource provides up-to-date versions. The latest LTS version as of the writing of this is v16, so install that:

$ wget https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_16.x -O node_setup.sh
$ chmod +x node_setup.sh
$ sudo ./node_setup.sh
$ sudo apt install -y nodejs

Golang

Golang needs to be downloaded and installed manually. The latest version as of the writing of this is 1.17.7, but check the website and change the URLs below if necessary:

$ wget https://golang.org/dl/go1.17.7.linux-amd64.tar.gz
$ sudo tar -C /usr/local -xzf go1.17.7.linux-amd64.tar.gz
$ sudo ln -s /usr/local/go/bin/go /usr/local/bin/go

This downloads and extracts Golang to /usr/local/go, and creates a symlink to the go binary in /usr/local/bin (so it's in the $PATH).

Tensorflow

Tensorflow is an AI library developed by Google. PhotoPrism uses it to classify photos and detect faces. The necessary version (1.15, as of the writing of this) can be downloaded from the PhotoPrism website.

Choose the appropriate Tensorflow build based on whether your CPU supports the AVX or AVX2 instruction sets. You can check by running lscpu | egrep --color avx2?.

If you have a reasonably recent CPU, you'll want the "avx2" version:

$ wget https://dl.photoprism.org/tensorflow/linux/libtensorflow-linux-avx2-1.15.2.tar.gz
$ sudo tar -C /usr/local -xzf libtensorflow-linux-avx2-1.15.2.tar.gz
$ sudo ldconfig

For older CPUs, use the "avx" version:

$ wget https://dl.photoprism.org/tensorflow/linux/libtensorflow-linux-avx-1.15.2.tar.gz
$ sudo tar -C /usr/local -xzf libtensorflow-linux-avx-1.15.2.tar.gz
$ sudo ldconfig

If your CPU supports neither instruction set, use the "cpu" version:

$ wget https://dl.photoprism.org/tensorflow/linux/libtensorflow-linux-cpu-1.15.2.tar.gz
$ sudo tar -C /usr/local -xzf libtensorflow-linux-cpu-1.15.2.tar.gz
$ sudo ldconfig

If an unsupported version is chosen, the PhotoPrism service will fail to start with an "Illegal operation" error. To repair, just run the above steps again with the corrected archive path.

See https://dl.photoprism.org/tensorflow for download URLs for other platforms (like ARM).

System setup

Instead of running PhotoPrism as root or your own user, it is advisable to create a separate user account for it:

$ sudo useradd --system photoprism

Application directory

Create a directory where the compiled PhotoPrism code will be stored:

$ sudo mkdir -p /opt/photoprism/bin

Storage directory

Create a directory where PhotoPrism will store files like metadata, thumbnails, database (if using SQLite) and so on:

$ sudo mkdir /var/lib/photoprism
$ sudo chown photoprism:photoprism /var/lib/photoprism

Download and install PhotoPrism

Now download the PhotoPrism source code:

$ git clone https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism.git
$ cd photoprism
$ git checkout release

Then run the following commands to download the various dependencies for Tensorflow, the Node.js front-end and the Golang back-end, and install PhotoPrism in /opt/photoprism:

$ sudo make all
$ sudo ./scripts/build.sh prod /opt/photoprism/bin/photoprism
$ sudo cp -a assets/ /opt/photoprism/assets/
$ sudo chown -R photoprism:photoprism /opt/photoprism

The dependencies step can produce errors when running in shells like ZSH. Ensure you're using Bash if this happens.

Building the front-end can take more than 1 GB of RAM, and the build might crash with Javascript running out of memory. If using a virtual machine, allocate at least 2 GB. Alternatively, you can try limiting Node's memory usage as follows (adjust the number based on available RAM on your system):

$ NODE_OPTIONS=--max_old_space_size=1024 make all

If you're still having problems, consult the PhotoPrism makefile for the steps that make all executes, and try running them individually to isolate the problem.

Configure PhotoPrism:

Go to /var/lib/photoprism and create a file for PhotoPrism configuration parameters:

$ cd /var/lib/photoprism
$ sudo nano .env

This opens the file in the Nano text editor. Feel free to use another editor if you have a preference, but this guide will assume Nano.

The full list of configuration options is available here, but you can use the following as a starting point:

# Initial password for the admin user
PHOTOPRISM_ADMIN_PASSWORD="photoprism"

# PhotoPrism storage directories
PHOTOPRISM_STORAGE_PATH="/var/lib/photoprism"
PHOTOPRISM_ORIGINALS_PATH="/var/lib/photoprism/photos/Originals"
PHOTOPRISM_IMPORT_PATH="/var/lib/photoprism/photos/Import"

# Uncomment below if using MariaDB/MySQL instead of SQLite (the default)
# PHOTOPRISM_DATABASE_DRIVER="mysql"
# PHOTOPRISM_DATABASE_SERVER="MYSQL_IP_HERE"
# PHOTOPRISM_DATABASE_NAME="DB_NAME"
# PHOTOPRISM_DATABASE_USER="USER_NAME"
# PHOTOPRISM_DATABASE_PASSWORD="PASSWORD"

Press Ctrl+O and Enter to save, then Ctrl+X to exit Nano. Now enter the following command:

$ sudo chmod 640 .env

This ensures that the file cannot be read by other users on the system, as it contains sensitive details.

System service

The last step is setting up a system service so PhotoPrism can run automatically in the background.

Create a file for the service definition:

$ sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/photoprism.service

Add the following contents:

[Unit]
Description=PhotoPrism service
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=forking
User=photoprism
Group=photoprism
WorkingDirectory=/opt/photoprism
EnvironmentFile=/var/lib/photoprism/.env
ExecStart=/opt/photoprism/bin/photoprism up -d
ExecStop=/opt/photoprism/bin/photoprism down

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Now run the following commands to start the service and to have it start automatically on every boot:

$ sudo systemctl daemon-reload
$ sudo systemctl start photoprism
$ sudo systemctl enable photoprism

If all went well, you should be able to open http://YOUR-IP-HERE:2342 in a web browser and see the PhotoPrism interface. Log in as "admin" with the password set in the .env file.

Troubleshooting

Run the following command to check the service status:

$ systemctl status photoprism