No more Docker in my Homelab

For 2 years now, I've been using and running all my containers with Podman Quadlets.

It it my preferred way of runnig containers, and has replaced Docker and Docker Compose in my homelab.

Personally, Podman Quadlets just jive with the way I like to do things:

• Each container is its own rootless, systemd service (vs. Docker's rootful daemon).
• Each container is declared using systemd syntax (vs. Docker Compose YAML).
• Each container can be managed and viewed with SystemD systemctl and journalctl commands.
• Volumes, Networks, and Pods can be created and declared text files.
• Containers in a pod can be re/started all at once using systemctl --user re/start.

But the one thing that kept me back (and Docker installed) was Immich, a self-hosted Google Photos replacement.

Not my first rodeo

A couple of months ago I tried to move Immich to Podman quadlets.

Converting Immich's docker-compose.yml and example.env to the podman quadlet equivalent wasn't hard, just tedious. Factoring out each individual app into its own .container quadlet was pretty straightforward, albeit a might messy.

A .container quadlet can only have one container declared in it, and SystemD does not support string interpolation (no ${UPLOAD_LOCATION} allowed).

So the 2 Docker files (docker-compose.yml and example.env) became 5 podman quadlets, the fifth being an immich.pod to group all Immich containers together:

1. immich-server.container for the Immich server
2. immich-db.container for the Postgres database
3. immich-redis.container for the Redis container
4. immich-ml.container for the machine learning container
5. immich.pod to create a Pod for the containers above

(The environment variables are hard-coded in their respective .container files.)

And almost everything worked.

What happened to my thumbnails?

For whatever reason, I could not get thumbnail generation to work, even though both OCI runtimes were runnig on the same host.

I spent a couple of hours trying to troubleshoot the issue, from basic Samba permissions to archaic SELinux flags, and still could not find the solution.

What I thought would be a relatively simple transition turned out to be a very frustrating reality.

So I admitted defeat and reconciled that Docker was going to have to stay if I wanted to use Immich (until I eventually move to NixOS).

Second time's the charm

After having a frustrating time with my NixOS config, I decided to try again with Immich and Podman Quadlet.

And I'm happy to report that I finally got rid of Docker from my homelab.

I'm not entirely sure what changed between then and now. Maybe it was because Immich released V2, or maybe podman fixed something in one of their updates.

Regardless, thumbnails generate as they should on my Samba share, and I am Docker free.