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Set up automatic updates
Immich
You like to live dangerously, right?
Raid is a backup
Here. You dropped this: /s
Yeah a little xD but FWIW this article series is based on what I personally run (and have set up for several friends) and its been doing pretty well for at least a year.
But I have backups which can be used to recover from the issues with breaking updates.
Photoprism > Immich
I haven't tried photoprism in a while, but when I tried it, it wasn't even close.
Photoprism seems more suited if you're a photographer to index your professional work where immich aims to be a google photos/icloud alternative.
Immich has native mobile apps to do the syncing and provide a (great) interface for search, it has much better multi-user support, including sharing albums, and much more features than I'm willing to type out here.
The only thing missing, for me at least, is better support for local files to eliminate the need for another gallery app/file picker.
This is very cool, but also very dangerous. Many projects release versions that need some sort of manual intervention to be updated, and automatically updating to new versions on docker can lead to data loss in those situations.
Here’s a recent example from Immich:
https://github.com/immich-app/immich/releases/tag/v1.133.0
It is my humble opinion that teaching newbies to do automatic updates will cause them to lose data and break things, which will probably sour them from ever self hosting again.
Automatic OS updates are fine, and docker update notifications are fine, but automatic docker updates are just too dangerous.
That's reasonable, however, my personal bias is towards security and I feel like if I don't push people towards automated updates, they will leave vulnerable, un-updated containers exposed to the web. I think a better approach would be to push for backups with versioning. I forgot to add that I am planning a "backups with Syncthing" article as well, I will take this into consideration, add it to the article, and use it as a way to demonstrate recovery in the event of such an issue.
Been in it since the web was a thing. I agree wholeheartedly. If people don't run auto updates and newbies will not run manual updates, You're just teaching them how to make vulnerabilities.
Let them learn how to fix an automatic update failure rather than how to recover from ransomware. No contest here.
Even though I’m already experienced in self-hosting, I absolutely love that you’re making this available. We need more on-ramps for newbies. Cheers!
Naturally, the same day that I publish this, I discover that Watchtower is semi-abandoned, so I'm gonna have to look into alternatives to that...
Just call me Mr. BuzzKill. LOL I learned that there is a fork at https://watchtower.devcdn.net/. Deployed it yesterday, and for the first round of updates, everything went as it should. No runs, no drips, no errors. Time will tell.
Did I miss the part where we set up the server?
Its covered in the introduction what's expected of the reader and server setup, and towards the end of the intro I go over the unattended-upgrades setup.
So yes, there's nothing about setting up Ubuntu, just that you have to have it set up already
this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2025
28 points (96.7% liked)
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