Today, I spent some time getting my photo setup together, (and away from manually uploading them to my storage box from time to time 😬).

So I’ve decided I’d give Immich (as a self-hostable photo solution on my server) a try.

§ Setting up Immich

Setting Immich up with NixOS is relatively straightforward, at least at first glance:

services.immich = {
  enable = true;
  host = "photos.example.ts.net";
};

But since I’m not running a Tailscale network (yet, I guess?), I need to make my immich service reachable from the outside.

This looks like this:

services.immich = {
  enable = true;
};

services.caddy = {
  enable = true;
  virtualHosts."photos.your.domain" = {
  extraConfig = ''
    reverse_proxy 127.0.0.1:2283
  '';
  };
};

Now we’ve got a machine running Immich that’s reachable from the outside via a domain.

Meaning: You should be able to go to https://photos.your.domain, and see the Immich login screen.

So that’s it—almost.

§ Mounting a storage box

We’ve still got one problem:

The machine this is running on is the smallest Hetzner VPS: powerful enough to run Immich, but not large enough to host all the photos.
It’s got only 40GB of disk space, and upgrading that gets expensive fast.
So you probably don’t want to store photos on there.

Thankfully, Hetzner also has a service called a Storage Box.

A Storage Box has the opposite characteristics to a VPS: It’s pretty cheap per TB, but you can’t really run anything on it.
So, let’s match the two.

What we’re going to do is the following:

We will mount the storage box as a file system into the folder in which Immich is going to store its data in.

For this, you need to:

1. Have a Storage Box (so rent one)
2. Create a new sub-account (with corresponding subfolder) on it. Save the password for this into your password manager
3. Mount the subfolder into our server

Mounting the subfolder looks like this:

services.immich = {
  enable = true;
};

services.caddy = {
  enable = true;
  virtualHosts."photos.your.domain" = {
  extraConfig = ''
    reverse_proxy 127.0.0.1:2283
  '';
  };
};
environment.systemPackages = [ pkgs.cifs-utils ];
fileSystems."/var/lib/immich" = {
  device = "//uXXXXXX-subX.your-storagebox.de/uXXXXXX-subX";
  fsType = "cifs";
  options = [
    "x-systemd.automount"
    "noauto"
    "x-systemd.device-timeout=5s"
    "x-systemd.mount-timeout=5s"
    "credentials=${config.clan.core.vars.generators.storagebox-immich-secret.files."credentials".path}"
    "uid=immich"
    "gid=immich"
  ];
};

§ Notes