Docker Compose [Recommended]
Docker Compose is the recommended method to run Immich in production. Below are the steps to deploy Immich with Docker Compose.
Immich requires Docker Compose version 2.x.
Step 1 - Download the required files
Create a directory of your choice (e.g. ./immich-app) to hold the docker-compose.yml and .env files.
mkdir ./immich-app
cd ./immich-app
Download docker-compose.yml and example.env, either by running the following commands:
wget -O docker-compose.yml https://github.com/immich-app/immich/releases/latest/download/docker-compose.yml
wget -O .env https://github.com/immich-app/immich/releases/latest/download/example.env
wget -O hwaccel.transcoding.yml https://github.com/immich-app/immich/releases/latest/download/hwaccel.transcoding.yml
wget -O hwaccel.ml.yml https://github.com/immich-app/immich/releases/latest/download/hwaccel.ml.yml
or by downloading from your browser and moving the files to the directory that you created.
Note: If you downloaded the files from your browser, also ensure that you rename example.env to .env.
Optionally, you can enable hardware acceleration for machine learning and transcoding. See the Hardware Transcoding and Hardware-Accelerated Machine Learning guides for info on how to set these up.
Step 2 - Populate the .env file with custom values
Example .env content
.env content# You can find documentation for all the supported env variables at https://immich.app/docs/install/environment-variables
# The location where your uploaded files are stored
UPLOAD_LOCATION=./library
# The location where your database files are stored
DB_DATA_LOCATION=./postgres
# To set a timezone, uncomment the next line and change Etc/UTC to a TZ identifier from this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tz_database_time_zones#List
# TZ=Etc/UTC
# The Immich version to use. You can pin this to a specific version like "v1.71.0"
IMMICH_VERSION=release
# Connection secret for postgres. You should change it to a random password
# Please use only the characters `A-Za-z0-9`, without special characters or spaces
DB_PASSWORD=postgres
# The values below this line do not need to be changed
###################################################################################
DB_USERNAME=postgres
DB_DATABASE_NAME=immich
- Populate custom database information if necessary.
- Populate
UPLOAD_LOCATIONwith your preferred location for storing backup assets. - Consider changing
DB_PASSWORDto a custom value. Postgres is not publically exposed, so this password is only used for local authentication. To avoid issues with Docker parsing this value, it is best to use only the charactersA-Za-z0-9. - Set your timezone by uncommenting the
TZ=line.
Step 3 - Start the containers
From the directory you created in Step 1, (which should now contain your customized docker-compose.yml and .env files) run docker compose up -d.
docker compose up -d
If you get an error unknown shorthand flag: 'd' in -d, you are probably running the wrong Docker version. (This happens, for example, with the docker.io package in Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS.) You can correct the problem by apt removeing Ubuntu's docker.io package and installing docker and docker-compose via Docker's official repository.
Note that the correct command really is docker compose, not docker-compose. If you try the latter on vanilla Ubuntu 22.04 it will fail in a different way:
The Compose file './docker-compose.yml' is invalid because:
'name' does not match any of the regexes: '^x-'
See the previous paragraph about installing from the official docker repository.
If you get an error can't set healthcheck.start_interval as feature require Docker Engine v25 or later, it helps to comment out the line for start_interval in the database section of the docker-compose.yml file.
For more information on how to use the application, please refer to the Post Installation guide.
Downloading container images might require you to authenticate to the GitHub Container Registry (steps here).
Step 4 - Upgrading
It is important to follow breaking updates to avoid problems. You can see versions that had breaking changes here.
If IMMICH_VERSION is set, it will need to be updated to the latest or desired version.
When a new version of Immich is released, the application can be upgraded with the following commands, run in the directory with the docker-compose.yml file:
docker compose pull && docker compose up -d
Immich is currently under heavy development, which means you can expect breaking changes and bugs. Therefore, we recommend reading the release notes prior to updating and to take special care when using automated tools like Watchtower.