Docker Security Guide

For advanced users only. This guide is maintained by the community and may contain inaccurate or incomplete advice. You can contribute by clicking to send a pull request with your changes.

Run Services as Non-Root User

It is recommended that you run the photoprism service as a non-root user by setting either the user service property or the PHOTOPRISM_UID and PHOTOPRISM_GID environment variable in your docker-compose.yml file:

Environment	Default	Description
PHOTOPRISM_UID	0	run as a non-root user after initialization (supported: 0, 33, 50-99, 500-600, 900-1250, and 2000-2100)
PHOTOPRISM_GID	0	run with a specific group id after initialization, can optionally be used together with PHOTOPRISM_UID (supported: 0, 33, 44, 50-99, 105, 109, 115, 116, 500-600, 900-1250, and 2000-2100)

If you are using hardware video transcoding, it should depend on the owner of the video device which user and group you choose so that the service has permission to access it.

Finally, remember to update the file permissions and/or owner with the chmod and chown commands when you make changes to the UID or GID, and restart the services for your changes to take effect:

docker compose stop
docker compose up -d

Note that our examples use the new docker compose command by default. If your server does not yet support it, you can still use docker-compose or alternatively podman-compose on Red Hat-compatible Linux distributions.

Remove Passwords From the Environment

Passwords specified directly in a docker-compose.yml file or otherwise passed to the container environment may pose a security risk. As an alternative, they can be set in an options.yml file located in the config storage folder:

AdminPassword: "my super secret password"
DatabasePassword: "my super secret password"

Likewise, MariaDB can be configured to use Docker secret files. For details, see the Docker Compose Documentation.

The following is an example of the changes to the docker-compose.yml file. Note that this example includes only the additional lines required to pass secret files to the MariaDB container:

secrets:
  # Secrets are single-line text files where the sole
  # content is the secret. Paths in this example assume
  # that secrets are kept in local ".secrets" folder. 
  DB_ROOT_PWD:
    file: .secrets/db_root_pwd.txt
  DB_PWD:
    file: .secrets/db_pwd.txt

services:
  mariadb:
    environment:
      # Change the env variables to _FILE and point them to
      # the file locations within the container.
      MARIADB_PASSWORD_FILE: /run/secrets/DB_PWD
      MARIADB_ROOT_PASSWORD_FILE: /run/secrets/DB_ROOT_PWD
    secrets:
      # Give the container access to the secrets to mount
      # the files within the container.
      - DB_ROOT_PWD
      - DB_PWD

Rootless Docker

In addition, you can run the Docker daemon as a non-root user in rootless mode. Configuring this is beyond the scope of this guide. For more information and instructions, see the Docker Security Documentation.