PhotoPrism self-boot
This morning I made PhotoPrism self-booting. I am not certain that this is the write term so I will specify what I mean. PhotoPrism, when run via docker boots, when we tell it to boot, like any other app on our laptop. This morning, after a little time spent with AI I found the solution.
I used ChatGPT for this help but this is to give you an idea of how to enable docker containers to boot automatically rather than manually. It’s by a little trial and error that I suceeded in what I wanted to do.
Boiled down Chat GPT gave this overview
To start a service: sudo systemctl start servicename.service
To stop a service: sudo systemctl stop servicename.service
To restart a service: sudo systemctl restart servicename.service
To enable a service to start on boot: sudo systemctl enable servicename.service
To disable a service from starting on boot: sudo systemctl disable servicename service
In concrete terms you need to “sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/photoprism.service” and add
[Unit] Description=PhotoPrism Docker Compose Service
Requires=docker.service
After=docker.service [Service] Type=oneshot
RemainAfterExit=yes
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/docker-compose -f /path/to/your/docker-compose.yml up -d
ExecStop=/usr/local/bin/docker-compose -f /path/to/your/docker-compose.yml down [Install] WantedBy=default.target
In my case it was /usr/bin rather than local bin. That’s a little thing to look out for. To double check use “which docker-compose” and you will see what to use for the execstart address.
If you are using an external volume double check that the mount point is static. I rebooted twice and got three mount points as well as an “original picture folder empty” message due to the photo drive being mounted in the wrong place. To fix this I used.
sudo blkid
to locate the uuid of the hard drive before personalising this line:
UUID=
/path/to/mountpoint ext4 defaults 0 2
I left the defaults behaviouts. The 0 is for fsck to check the file system and 2 is the backup priority number.
This is added via:
sudo nano /etc/fstab
Once you have ensured that the drive mount point will remain the same, boot after boot you can run the next lines.
Reload Systemd
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
Enable PhotoPrism to launch at boot
sudo systemctl enable photoprism.service
To start the service
sudo systemctl start photoprism.service
And finally you can run
sudo systemctl status photoprism.service
to check service status.
And Finally
When I set up a server for photoprism or other services I want it to boot automatically as soon as the computer is booted. I don’t want to have to start services manually. With this workflow I was able to setup PhotoPrism to boot automatically, as well as to make sure that the photo drive would mount to the right place each time I booted the system.
