Jan "Jenkings" Škoda - blog

To be honest, I have never worked with application containers before. Not directly, at least.

However, as I wrote some time ago, I am running TrueNAS, mainly for backing up photos. I also have some apps running, such as a VPN, Git and Syncthing. I installed them through the official 'store' with apps. Yes, they are basically containers, but I deployed them by simply clicking 'Install'.

Now, I will explain why I had to set up a container myself. I sync all the photos and data in various ways, but I need a front end for easy listing and access. I liked Photoprism the most. I had some trouble getting it to work, but after adjusting some settings, I managed to get it working. The application kept crashing and would not deploy, but after making some changes to the configuration GUI, it ran and worked for a long time. That was until I decided to upgrade the TrueNAS system. Then problems appeared. Photoprism refused to run and kept crashing because it was compiled with support for SSE instructions, which my CPU does not support.

The confusing thing is that according to the documentation, this TrueNAS app has always required SSE, and then it should never have worked. However, it worked until then. Nevertheless, I was unable to get it working again, so I left the application disabled and forgot about the issue.

Until now, I needed an easy way to access and list photos. There was no way to get the original app to work, and none of the other media libraries available in the app store were suitable for me.

My last chance was to deploy it with Docker. I had never done anything with Docker before. I also needed to make it visible through a VPN and make my listed directories read-only so that the app wouldn't mess up my archive.

It was really tricky for me and I had no idea what I was doing. I let the AI assemble the basic YAML for me, then made the necessary changes, connected it to the required services, and within an hour it was done. The biggest issues I faced were with networking, both on the local network and through the VPN. However, I'm really happy that it finally works again.