circled-me/server

Photo, Chat and Sharing Community Server

circled.me community server

This project aims to help people easily backup and share photos, videos, albums on their own server. Focusing on performance, low footprint and ease of implementation and use. Upcoming releases will further enable you to share with your circles by including group chats and more.

After certain services that scan for faces, locations, etc, became paid some time ago, I have decided I'd rather be able to host my own photos. The main reason being, of course, privacy! But also at that time, there was no alternatve that offered good performance and low CPU/memory usage. This project has currently only one contributor (i.e. me), so help will be greatly appreciated 😊

Another focus of this project is having the ability to host everything a community needs to be able to communicate and exchange photos, ideas, etc. I strongly believe in local/focused communities and sharing with the community, but at the same time - keeping everything private, within the community. In my personal case, I share mostly photos with my family and close friends.

Logo is madebytow.com

Mobile app

The circled.me mobile app works with multiple accounts and servers. For example, you can have your family server and account, and your gaming/running/reading comunities' accounts on the same app and being able to interact with all of them at the same time.

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⚠️ NOTE: Please note that this project is still in development and could introduce breaking changes.

⚠️ WARNING: Do not use this as your main/only backup solution.

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Main features:

• Fast response times and low CPU and memory usage
• iOS and Android photo backup (using the circled.me app)
  • Supports either locally mounted disks or
  • S3-compatible Services - this allows different users to use their own S3 bucket on the same server
• Push notifications for new Album photos, etc
• Albums
  • Adding local server contributors and viewers
  • Sharing albums with anyone with a "secret" link
• Filtering photos by year, month, location, etc
• Moments - automatically grouping photos by time and location
• Reverse geocoding for all assets
• Automatic video conversion to web-compatible H.264 format

Feautres that are in-progress and/or prioritised:

• Map browsing of photos
• Group chats
• Face detection and tagging
• Bulk-adding assets by:
  • Scanning directories on local disks
  • Scanning objects on already existing S3 bucket prefix

Compiling and Running the server

The easiest way to try and run the server is within a docker container, see example docker-compose file below.

docker-compose -f docker-compose-example.yaml up

Note: If you change the source code (e.g. pull new version), you might need to remove your local cached Docker image for the circled-server service.

Now you can use the app and connect to your server at http://<YOUR_IP>:8080 and create your first admin user. Then you need to create a Storage Bucket from Settings and assign that to any User that is going to backup their photos there. If you used the example docker compose above, then the Path or your new Storage Bucket should be something like /mnt/data1/some-sub-dir

Current configuration environment variables:

• MYSQL_DSN - see example or refer to https://github.com/go-sql-driver/mysql#dsn-data-source-name
• BIND_ADDRESS - IP and port to bind to (incompatible with TLS_DOMAINS). This is useful if your server is, say, behind reverse proxy
• TLS_DOMAINS - a list of comma-separated domain names. This uses the Let's Encrypt Gin implementation (https://github.com/gin-gonic/autotls)
• DEBUG_MODE - currently defaults to yes

docker-compose example

This docker-compose file is just an example and does provide only basic configuration. Modify the mysql-data and asset-data below at the very least to suitable locations with enough space, etc. Better though, use your "proper" MySQL server instead of running it in Docker.

NOTE: Please do not use this in production.

version: '2'
services:
  circled-server:
    image: gubble/circled-server:latest
    # build:
    #  dockerfile: Dockerfile
    restart: always
    depends_on:
      mysql:
        condition: service_healthy
    ports:
      - "8080:8080"
    environment:
      MYSQL_DSN: "root:@tcp(mysql:3306)/circled?charset=utf8mb4&parseTime=True&loc=Local"
      BIND_ADDRESS: 0.0.0.0:8080
    volumes:
      - ./asset-data:/mnt/data1
  mysql:
    image: mysql:5.7
    command: --default-authentication-plugin=mysql_native_password
    restart: always
    volumes:
      - ./mysql-data:/var/lib/mysql
    environment:
      MYSQL_DATABASE: circled
      MYSQL_ALLOW_EMPTY_PASSWORD: "yes"
      MYSQL_ROOT_HOST: "%"
    healthcheck:
      test: mysqladmin ping --silent
      start_period: 5s
      interval: 3s
      timeout: 5s
      retries: 20