Static site generator for NextCloud photos

October 22, 2018

Inspired by a tweet from @mattsches on how to host and share photos, many people replied with really good ideas.

Here is my approach:

Hosting with nextcloud

I like the idea of hosting by my own with nextcloud.
The Android and iOS integration is great and makes it very easy to upload photos
You can use the drop function gather photos on an event from other people
The gallery is a nice piece of software

Using a static site generator for photos

Configuration

All this stuff is running on the same server.
I’m using all software in containers, using docker and docker-compose.
As web server Traefik is used.

Traefik (web server)

# /srv/docker/traefik/docker-compose.yml

version: '2'

services:
  traefik:
    image: traefik
    restart: always
    expose:
      - "8080"
    labels:
      - "traefik.docker.network=traefik_web"
      - "traefik.enable=true"
      - "traefik.basic.frontend.rule=Host:traefik.mydomain.com"
      - "traefik.basic.port=8080"
      - "traefik.basic.protocol=http"
    ports:
      - "80:80"
      - "443:443"
    networks:
      - web
    volumes:
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock
      - ./acme.json:/acme.json
      - ./traefik.toml:/traefik.toml

networks:
  web:
    external:
      name: traefik_web

Nextcloud

For nextcloud the nexcloud-base image is used:

# /srv/docker/nextcloud/docker-compose.yml

version: '2'

services:

  db:
    image: mariadb
    restart: always
    volumes:
      - db:/var/lib/mysql
    environment:
      - MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=!CHANGEME!
      - MYSQL_PASSWORD=!CHANGEME!
      - MYSQL_DATABASE=nextcloud
      - MYSQL_USER=nextcloud

  nextcloud:
    image: nextcloud
    restart: always
    expose:
      - "80"
    links:
      - db
    networks:
      - web
      - default
    volumes:
      - nextcloud:/var/www/html
      - /mnt/sdb2/nextcloud/data:/data:rw
    labels:
      - "traefik.docker.network=traefik_web"
      - "traefik.enable=true"
      - "traefik.frontend.rule=Host:cloud.mydomain.com"
      - "traefik.port=80"
      - "traefik.protocol=http"

volumes:
  db:
  nextcloud:

networks:
  web:
    external:
      name: traefik_web

Thumbsup (static site generator)

Now it’s getting interesting. Here comes the docker-compose.yml for the statiy site generator.

# /srv/docker/thumbsup/docker-compose.yml

version: '2'
services:
  web:
    restart: always
    image: nginx:latest
    expose:
      - "80"
    volumes:
      - static_html:/usr/share/nginx/html
    labels:
      - "traefik.docker.network=traefik_web"
      - "traefik.enable=true"
      - "traefik.basic.frontend.rule=Host:photos.mydomain.com"
      - "traefik.basic.frontend.auth.basic=test:$apr1$ASxYdF4/$EsG.4UNVuNXKRI2.WH7Oa"
      - "traefik.basic.port=80"
      - "traefik.basic.protocol=http"
    networks:
      - web
      - default

  thumbsup:
    restart: always
    build: ./thumbsup
    volumes:
      - /mnt/sdb2/nextcloud/data/ralf/files/Photos:/input
      - static_html:/output
      - ./thumbsup/config:/config

  dyndns:
     restart: always
     build: ./dyndns

volumes:
  static_html:

networks:
  web:
    external:
      name: traefik_web

We can see here 3 containers:

web: serves the static content
thumbsup: generates the content
dyndns: updates the IP on the dyndns-service

Lets look into the thumbsup-container:

Thumbsup

# /srv/docker/thumbsup/thumbsup/Dockerfile

FROM thumbsupgallery/thumbsup

COPY config/cronjobs /etc/crontabs/root

CMD ["crond", "-f", "-d", "8"]

To the original Docker-Container we’re adding a cronjob.

# /srv/docker/thumbsup/thumbsup/config/cronjobs
*/15 * * * * /usr/local/bin/thumbsup --config /config/config.json --input /input --output /output

The thumbsup-config is well documented.

{
    "title": "MyTitle",
    "original-photos": false,
    "theme": "cards",
    "sort-albums-direction": "desc",
    "cleanup": true
}