Not Production just "Home-lab" Ready #

In a previous post I was complaining about applications that didn't run correctly on FreeBSD.
Mostly because they were build specifically for Linux/MacOS and didn't provide any clear documentation on how to install for baremetal machines.
I knew that work had been done on the FreeBSD side to ensure compatibility with OCI containers. In fact, it is possible to run Podman on FreeBSD and even launch applications.

For a long time, I tried in vain to install Immich on FreeBSD, but it required too many PostgreSQL stacks compiled with specific modules, Redis, Python packages, etc. I found the task too tedious and gave up.
It was indeed possible to run Podman/Docker components, but simply copying and pasting containers created for Linux obviously didn’t work, and the containers had to specifically embed applications built for FreeBSD.

I also tried implementing various workarounds, starting with Bhyve to run an Alpine VM that would host the Docker containers. It works, of course. But I don’t like the extra resource overhead added by the virtualization layer. My machine (a small N100 with 16GB) isn’t equipped with the most powerful CPU on the market, and I’m focused on efficiency and trying to avoid setting up overly complicated architectures.

I recently discovered this fantastic project, deamonless.io. Someone, thanks to him, has taken the time to start building application images to package them as Podman containers that run on FreeBSD. Basically, this project offers a whole catalog of turnkey Podman/FreeBSD applications. Just read the Podman documentation, and a few minutes later you’ll have your first applications running in Podman on FreeBSD. There are still a few workarounds to set up to avoid bugs (but they’re very simple, well-documented, and will soon be fixed directly in the libraries).

It’s simply fantastic—a few years ago, I never would have thought it possible to run this kind of thing on FreeBSD.

Immich now runs on FreeBSD #

Thanks to Podman and the creator of this project. I've run a few tests. I have no trouble mounting an NFS share containing all the photos I’ve taken with my smartphone (about 40 GB), and I’ve also added a read-only share for my older photos (about 150 GB) that I took with my old cameras (going back as far as the early 2000s).

Everything works perfectly. Immich is truly excellent software; it handles these hundreds of gigabytes of photos without batting an eye. Generating thumbnails took only a few hours (there are still some “face detection” jobs running that aren’t finished, but I run them sporadically since they’re CPU-intensive).

Overall, the experience is much better with Nextcloud's “Memories” (though I still think it's a great app that has served me well for years). From my smartphone, I can go back 10 years in my history, and wow, the app displays the photos instantly—it’s incredible. With “Memories,” it used to take several tens of seconds, and sometimes it would even time out… Plus, the metadata management (EXIF/date/location) is really well thought out. In short, it’s a great app, and I don’t regret switching to it. The face and context recognition, for example, is also really cool. For instance, type “Dog” into the search bar, and it’ll pull up all the photos featuring a dog! (Obviously, it’s far from perfect and often a bit rough around the edges, but the gist of it is there.)
The smartphone application is also really nicelly done and allow you to free some space on your smartphone by removing old photos but still showing them on the immich application.

What to backup ? #

Regarding backups, the approach is different from that used with Jails. Here, there’s no need to back up the application itself.
You simply need to dump your PostgreSQL database and, of course, all your photos.
And that’s it, except perhaps your “podman-compose.yml” file if you’ve modified it to be able to quickly redeploy the application.

On the other hand, regarding security, it’s undoubtedly less mature than Jails. Furthermore, Podman creates a lot of mounts in your ZFS filesystem (“zroot/podman/instance-xXXX”). I don’t like that—I feel it spreads out quite a bit rather than staying contained within its ZFS set. It’s still much less clean than a jail.

By the way there’s currently a bug in the conmon package that breaks PostgreSQL dumps. It’s fixed (and will likely be fixed by the time you read this article) in conmon version conmon-2.1.13_11. If that’s not the case, there’s a detailed workaround in the GitHub issue. On the conmon github repo

Ready for home not for business. #

Obviously, just because it “works at home” doesn’t mean I’d deploy business-critical applications for a company using Podman on FreeBSD. It’s still a bit too early, and there’s not enough user feedback on the subject yet. However, it’s a first step forward, and so far everything I’ve tried has worked well. Let’s hope this continues and that the ecosystem matures on FreeBSD.

I invite you to support this great project deamonless.io

#self-hosting #FreeBSD #infrastructure