Running PhotoPrism with Kubernetes

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At a minimum, you can just define a Kubernetes Service and a StatefulSet and be up and running. For more real-world usage, you'll probably want to at least include persistent storage, and possibly some Ingress rules for exposing PhotoPrism outside your cluster.

Before you proceed, please ensure that your server has at least 4 GB of swap configured and avoid setting a hard memory limit as this can cause unexpected restarts when the indexer temporarily needs more memory to process large files. Indexing RAW images and high-resolution panoramas may require additional swap space and/or physical memory beyond the recommended minimum.

For those familiar with Helm, a PhotoPrism Helm chart is available.

Once you've got PhotoPrism deployed, you can exec into the running container and photoprism import your photos.

Here's an example of a YAML file that creates the following Kubernetes objects:

• Namespace
• Service exposing PhotoPrism on port 80
• StatefulSet with persistent NFS volumes
• Secret which stores the database DSN and admin password
• Ingress rule for a Kubernetes ingress controller
• Annotations for a Kubernetes Certificate Manager

apiVersion: v1
kind: Namespace
metadata:
  name: photoprism
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: photoprism-secrets
  namespace: photoprism
stringData:
  PHOTOPRISM_ADMIN_PASSWORD: <your admin password here>
  PHOTOPRISM_DATABASE_DSN: username:password@tcp(db-server-address:3306)/dbname?charset=utf8mb4,utf8&parseTime=true
---
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: StatefulSet
metadata:
  name: photoprism
  namespace: photoprism
spec:
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: photoprism
  serviceName: photoprism
  replicas: 1
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: photoprism
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: photoprism
        image: photoprism/photoprism:latest
        env:
        - name: PHOTOPRISM_DEBUG
          value: "true"
        - name: PHOTOPRISM_DATABASE_DRIVER
          value: mysql
        - name: PHOTOPRISM_HTTP_HOST
          value: 0.0.0.0
        - name: PHOTOPRISM_HTTP_PORT
          value: "2342"
        # Load database DSN & admin password from secret
        envFrom:
        - secretRef:
            name: photoprism-secrets
            optional: false
        ports:
        - containerPort: 2342
          name: http
        volumeMounts:
        - mountPath: /photoprism/originals
          name: originals
        - mountPath: /photoprism/import
          name: import
        - mountPath: /photoprism/storage
          name: storage
        readinessProbe:
          httpGet:
            path: /api/v1/status
            port: http
      volumes:
      - name: originals
        nfs:
          path: /originals
          # readOnly: true # Disables import and upload!
          server: my.nas.host
      - name: import
        nfs:
          path: /import
          server: my.nas.host
      - name: storage
        nfs:
          path: /storage
          server: my.nas.host
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: photoprism
  namespace: photoprism
spec:
  ports:
  - name: http
    port: 80
    protocol: TCP
    targetPort: http
  selector:
    app: photoprism
  type: ClusterIP
---
apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  annotations:
    # For nginx ingress controller:
    kubernetes.io/ingress.class: nginx
    # Default is very low so most photo uploads will fail:
    nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/proxy-body-size: "512M"
    # If using cert-manager:
    cert-manager.io/cluster-issuer: letsencrypt-prod
    kubernetes.io/tls-acme: "true"
  name: photoprism
  namespace: photoprism
spec:
  rules:
  - host: photoprism.my.domain
    http:
      paths:
      - backend:
          service:
            name: photoprism
            port:
              name: http
        path: /
        pathType: Prefix
  tls:
  - hosts:
    - photoprism.my.domain
    secretName: photoprism-cert

To run this locally, you can use minikube or a similar local cluster deployer.

Once your cluster is up and running with your kubectl commands. Simply copy the above YAML markup to a file, make the necessary changes, and use the kubectl CLI command to deploy:

kubectl create -f photoprism.yaml

If you prefer to use helm, see p80n/photoprism-helm.