Headless Linux server

:wave:

A friend just mentioned Aspect to me and it looks like a really interesting project - it’s actually very close to something I was scoping out myself, which is great because it would mean I don’t have to build it :sweat_smile:

My main use-case would be to store the majority of the library on my NAS and only the past month or two of full-res photos on my computers. I’ve been poking about and it looks like some sort of headless Linux server is planned, which would be exactly what I’d be looking for! I have an awful backlog of high-res wildlife photos that I never get around to culling out of laziness, so I just shove it all off to the NAS currently.

I don’t think I’ve seen a beta release of it knocking about, but when there is such a thing I’d be very interested in testing it out. I’m a software engineer myself so I can at least provide useful feedback, and if it’s open source, as I think I saw mentioned, I could potentially help out (my background is in Ruby but I can work in most things). It might make sense to have it set up with Docker, as that’s likely the easiest way of letting people run it on Synology devices.

I think one post mentioned a web interface for monitoring the server, which sounds like a nice idea. Depending on the language it might not be too difficult to include something like a Prometheus exporter too, to allow monitoring in Grafana (though if that doesn’t exist and there’s an API I’ll just make that myself later :smiley_cat: )

Basically; when there’s a beta copy of the server ready to try, gimme a shout - I’ll be ready to do some testing :+1:

Hi Robert,
we are currently working out the remaining larger issues with the network synchronization and the upcoming mobile apps. Once that is done, I don’t think anything is holding back publishing a build of the current experimental server version. It is still quite rudimentary in terms of UI, but does its job of serving as a central storage.

In terms of open-sourcing it, there is still some work ahead, such as cleaning up and documenting parts of the code, rearranging some code into different libraries/packages and setting up the public test infrastructure.

I’ll get back to you when we have something (probably together with the release after the next one, which should be out in the next few days).

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Add me to the list of interested beta testers for headless server. Would ideally run within a container

If nothing gets in the way, the headless version will be available together with the next release (Windows x64, Linux x64/arm64, macOS x86/arm64 universal). It will just be a binary with some resource files for now, so setting it up as a service or within a container will still be a manual task.