Lychee

I don’t participate on social media sites, but I do want to be able to easily share public photos with friends. This site works, but i wanted something built for photos with album support and options to make some public or private.

The Self Hosted show has talked a lot about photo sharing solutions. In episode 28 they mention Lychee. The Self Hosted show has talked a lot about photo sharing solutions. In episode 28 they mention Lychee. This is a very simple, open source photo album server that fit what I was looking for perfectly.

As usual, I found a great docker implementation by the good people over at linuxserver.io, complete with a docker-compose file which required very little tweaking.

version: "3"
services:
  mariadb-lychee:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/mariadb:latest
    container_name: lychee_mariadb
    restart: always
    volumes:
      - ./mariadb-lychee/data:/config
    environment:
      - MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=rootpassword
      - MYSQL_DATABASE=lychee
      - MYSQL_USER=lychee
      - MYSQL_PASSWORD=dbpassword
      - PGID=1000
      - PUID=1000
      - TZ=America/Chicago
  lychee:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/lychee:latest
    container_name: lychee
    restart: always
    depends_on:
      - mariadb-lychee
    volumes:
      - ./config:/config
      - ./pictures:/pictures
    environment:
      - DB_HOST=mariadb-lychee
      - DB_USERNAME=lychee
      - DB_PASSWORD=dbpassword
      - DB_DATABASE=lychee
      - DB_PORT=3306
      - PGID=1000
      - PUID=1000
      - TZ=America/Chicago
    ports:
      - 80:80

Easy, simple, no big deal.

The trick as always is to get nginx and ssl working with the docker container.

I sort of had a blueprint for how to set this up from my healthchecks deployment. It was easy to copy/paste/edit the config.

server {
    listen 80;
	listen [::]:80;
	
    server_name photos.shibby.xyz;

	location / {
	    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:80xx; # lychee docker
	}

Yep, its that easy. Then all it needed was to be put through certbot to enable SSL and its done.

Lychee is pretty great so far. Super easy to manage and control albums, sharing, users, etc. The minimalist interface is just what I wanted. It has a cool feature where it will import a photo given a direct link to the file. I can see this being useful to make grabbing images from the internet easily. It has fairly obvious dropbox integration, which i dont use, but I’m interested to see what other platforms the might be able to pull from.

Check it out photos.shibby.xyz.

Update 2023-12-30

container updates will fail to load static resources. They will attempt to load from localhost. This requires an addition of a proxy_set_header to the nginx config for the site.

location / {
    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8088; # lychee docker
    proxy_set_header Host $host;
}