My experience with Yuno and Immich

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Hey there,
Not a complaint, not a request, not a bug report, just a praise.
One month ago I had the need of finding a service that would allow me to host my photography. I had Immich on my radar but it’s an app that is only available through self-host (which was desirable for me anyway).
After a bit of research I found it was available on YunoHost catalog, and because I heard multiple time of Yuno, I thought it was the perfect opportunity to try it out.

So I subscribed to a VPS on OVH and went straight to install Yuno on it. The documentation was very clear and the install went well (had a bit of doubt about custom domains but got external help to answer it).

So without further a do I try to install Immich, but there the install crash. It was expected, because of the big warning that mention the install need at least 2G of ram, and my VPS only having 2G of RAM. After fixing this issue and another I managed to have a successful install and started using the app !

This was very satisfying and it took me about a day to complete. I wouldn’t qualify the whole
experience as easy, but it was not frustrating. I had to take my time and properly read and research documentation.

I could have stopped here but yesterday I had to go in maintenance mode again to fix one problem: since, OVH had released new VPS offers, which for the same price were much more performant ! Their support told me I had to manually migrate myself the content of the old VPS to one from the new offer and this is where begin another journey.

So luckily for me I only have Immich to migrate. I first checked Immich’s documentation that explained how to backup and restore the app and loss quite some time there but that ended up being a wrong path. The actual solution was the YunoHost backup system, where I could create a backup of the Immich app, and transfer it to my new VPS !

yunohost backup create --apps immich --name immich-250820migration
# find where the backup is stored
yunohost backup info immich-250820migration
apt-get install rsync
rsync --archive --verbose /home/yunohost.backup/archives/immich-250820migration.tar <user>@<IPV4>:/home/yunohost.backup/archivesimmich-250820migration.tar

On restoring the backup on the new machine I got a weird error. The restore was successfull to Yuno’s POV, but the log indicated the Immich service could not be launched which was related to some nodejs not being found or something.
Luckily for me, I realised pretty quick that I had a different YunoHost version between my old and new VPS, 12.1 was released in between.
And so on, I ensure the 2 VPS have the same Yuno version, and run through all the backup/restore workflow again, which end up being successfull this time.

And this was for me a real “damn this is cool” moment. I could just migrate 2.5GB of app data, effortlessly between 2 machine ?! The Immich backup documentation was kinda scary with a lot of warnings everywhere but YunoHost made the whole process a breeze !

Anyway that was just a quick user-experience story, thanks to the YunoHost team, thanks to the Immich YunoHost app maintainers !

P.S.: I lied, here is a few suggestion from my above experience:

  • I think the search function in the documentation is limited to only showing 4/5 results and that is very annoying.
  • knowing how to setup my custom domain was not easy, there is documentation but I had the use-case of already using mydomain.tld somewhere else, and only wanted to use subdomains for Yuno apps (e.g immich.mydomain.tld). Took me a bit of time to figure it out, DNS and domains are confusing.
  • would be cool to be able to have a way to visually uniquely identify a YunoHost instance in the web interface. For the migration I had to jump between 2 instances interface and always had to double check the url I was on before doing any operation (and IP url are hard to read).

Best,
Liam.

5 Likes
2

Thanks for your feadback!

knowing how to setup my custom domain was not easy, there is documentation but I had the use-case of already using mydomain.tld somewhere else, and only wanted to use subdomains for Yuno apps (e.g immich.mydomain.tld). Took me a bit of time to figure it out, DNS and domains are confusing.

Now that you know how to, be our guess to update the doc at GitHub - YunoHost/doc: YunoHost documentation :wink:

3

Oh great, I can do that !

However trying to get the doc running on my machine I am greeted by some blocking error messages:

git clone https://github.com/YunoHost/doc.git YunoHost-doc
cd YunoHost-doc
corepack yarn
corepack yarn start

yarn run v1.22.22
$ docusaurus start
[INFO] Starting the development server...
[ERROR] The docs sidebar category metadata file "admin/05.get_started/10.providers/05.registrar/_category_.yaml" looks invalid!
[ERROR] Sidebars file at "Z:\packages-dev\YunoHost-doc\sidebars.ts" failed to be loaded.
[ERROR] Loading of version failed for version current

[ERROR] [Error [ValidationError]: "value" must be of type object] {
  _original: null,
  details: [
    {
      message: '"value" must be of type object',
      path: [],
      type: 'object.base',
      context: { type: 'object', label: 'value', value: null }
    }
  ]
}
[INFO] Docusaurus version: 3.7.0
Node version: v22.18.0
error Command failed with exit code 1.
info Visit https://yarnpkg.com/en/docs/cli/run for documentation about this command.

I’m not familiar with the Javascript ecosystem at all so this is pretty obscure to debug for me.

4

If I remember well, you just have to add an empty line in _category_.yaml

5

Thanks, here is the PR:

3 Likes