Immich

Immich is a self-hosted photo and video management solution.

Installation

To install Immich, add the following to your NixOS configuration:

❄︎ /etc/nixos/configuration.nix

services.immich.enable = true;
services.immich.port = 2283;

More options are available: services.immich.

Tips and Tricks

Enabling Hardware Accelerated Video Transcoding

Add the Immich user to the render and video groups, override the PrivateDevices service config setting to allow the service to access /dev/dri/ and enable Accelerated Video Playback on your system:

❄︎ /etc/nixos/configuration.nix

# `null` will give access to all devices.
# You may want to restrict this by using something like `[ "/dev/dri/renderD128" ]`
services.immich.accelerationDevices = null;

hardware.graphics = { 
 # ...
 # See: https://wiki.nixos.org/wiki/Accelerated_Video_Playback
};

users.users.immich.extraGroups = [ "video" "render" ];

Using Immich behind Nginx

This is a typical Nginx configuration for Immich:

❄︎ /etc/nixos/configuration.nix

services.nginx.virtualHosts."immich.example.com" = {
  enableACME = true;
  forceSSL = true;
  locations."/" = {
    proxyPass = "http://[::1]:${toString config.services.immich.port}";
    proxyWebsockets = true;
    recommendedProxySettings = true;
    extraConfig = ''
      client_max_body_size 50000M;
      proxy_read_timeout   600s;
      proxy_send_timeout   600s;
      send_timeout         600s;
    '';
  };
};

Using borg for backups

Following Immichs backup docs and backup script an automated backup using Borg backup could look something like this:

❄︎ /etc/nixos/configuration.nix

services.borgbackup.jobs."Immich" = {
  paths = "/var/lib/immich";
  repo = "<path-to-borg-repo>";
  startAt = "Sat 04:00";
  compression = "zstd";
  encryption.mode = "none";
  prune.keep = {
    last = 2;
  };
};

Make sure to manually create a borg repo at the desired location beforehand with sudo borg init --encryption=none <path-to-borg-repo

Troubleshooting

Fixing postgresql database issue after 25.05 upgrade

Postgresql collation version mismatch

After upgrading you might run into an issue like this, leading to immich-server continuously failing and restarting:

Jul 01 14:23:12 server2 immich[178592]: Postgres notice: {
Jul 01 14:23:12 server2 immich[178592]:   severity_local: 'WARNING',
Jul 01 14:23:12 server2 immich[178592]:   severity: 'WARNING',
Jul 01 14:23:12 server2 immich[178592]:   code: '01000',
Jul 01 14:23:12 server2 immich[178592]:   message: 'database "immich" has a collation version mismatch',
Jul 01 14:23:12 server2 immich[178592]:   detail: 'The database was created using collation version 2.39, but the operating system provides version 2.40.',
Jul 01 14:23:12 server2 immich[178592]:   hint: 'Rebuild all objects in this database that use the default collation and run ALTER DATABASE immich REFRESH COLLATION VERSION,>
Jul 01 14:23:12 server2 immich[178592]:   file: 'postinit.c',
Jul 01 14:23:12 server2 immich[178592]:   line: '477',
Jul 01 14:23:12 server2 immich[178592]:   routine: 'CheckMyDatabase'
Jul 01 14:23:12 server2 immich[178592]: }

To fix this, run sudo -u immich psql -d immich and execute these two commands:

ALTER DATABASE immich REFRESH COLLATION VERSION;
REINDEX DATABASE immich;

Upgrading pgvecto.rs

If you still run into issues after restarting postgresql and immich-server services, some additional postgresql database changes might be necessary to upgrade pgvecto.rs table:

Run sudo -u postgresql psql and execute consecutively:

CREATE EXTENSION IF NOT EXISTS unaccent; 
CREATE EXTENSION IF NOT EXISTS "uuid-ossp"; 
CREATE EXTENSION IF NOT EXISTS vectors; 
CREATE EXTENSION IF NOT EXISTS cube; 
CREATE EXTENSION IF NOT EXISTS earthdistance; 
CREATE EXTENSION IF NOT EXISTS pg_trgm; 
ALTER EXTENSION vectors UPDATE;
SELECT pgvectors_upgrade();

Finally, restart postgresql and immich: systemctl restart postgresql && systemctl restart immich-server

Immich server too old on NixOS stable

If you encounter errors like Error processing stream or Error in runInIsolateGentle for remote-sync on Android/iOS clients, the cause may be that the Immich server version packaged in nixos-stable is behind the mobile apps.

You can use the Immich package from nixos-unstable while keeping the rest of your system on stable. Add the following to the top of your /etc/nixos/configuration.nix:

let
  unstableTarball = fetchTarball "https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/nixos-unstable.tar.gz";
in {
  nixpkgs.config = {
    packageOverrides = pkgs: {
      unstable = import unstableTarball {
        config = config.nixpkgs.config;
      };
    };
  };
}

Then override the Immich package in your service config:

services.immich.package = pkgs.unstable.immich;