Install Lychee Photo Management System on your Ubuntu Shell – Shells - Support

Lychee is a free photo management application that works just like Photos for Apple or Google Photos for Android. The only difference is that you can manage it on your own server and have full control and privacy. In this article, we will be guiding you through setting up Lychee so you can start storing your photos on your own cloud with Shells^TM.

First, we will need to make sure that we have apache, PHP and MySQL installed. For step by step instruction on this please click on the link below:

How to install LAMP stack on your Ubuntu Shell?

Also, if you would like to access Lychee remotely from anywhere you will need to purchase a public IP. Select the link below for more information

How do I order an IP address?

Once you have your web server installed, we can now move on to installing Lychee.

Create a MySQL root password and verify MySQL is running

Creating a root password for MySQL

sudo mysqladmin -u root password Password

Replace "Password" with your own secure password. Example below:

Before moving on let's enable MySQL to start at boot and check its status to see if it is running.

sudo systemctl enable mysql
sudo systemctl status mysql

If it is not running, we will use the systemctl start command

sudo systemctl start mysql

Creating a database for Lychee

Now let's move on to create a database for Lychee.

sudo mysql -u root -p

And create the database as below. You can replace lychee_db, shells_user, and SecurePass with your own user information.

CREATE DATABASE lychee_db CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;
CREATE USER 'shells_user'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'UltraSecurePassword';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON lychee_db.* TO 'lychee_user'@'localhost';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
EXIT;

Updating php.ini file

Once we have confirmed MySQL is running and have created a database for Lychee, we will need to update the php.ini file to be able to handle the file processing of photos.

sudo nano /etc/php/7.0/apache2/php.ini

Once opened, make these changes to the file:

max_execution_time = 300
post_max_size = 100M
upload_max_filesize = 50M
memory_limit = 256M

Installing the Lychee Files

cd into your web directory.

cd var/www/html/

And use the wget command to download the Lychee files

sudo wget --content-disposition https://github.com/electerious/Lychee/archive/v3.1.6.zip

Verify download with ls -a

Next, we will remove index.html and unzip Lychee-3.1.6.zip

sudo rm index.html
sudo unzip Lychee-3.1.6.zip

Once files are uncompressed, let's move all of the installation files to the web root directory:

sudo mv -v Lychee-3.1.6/* Lychee-3.1.6/.* /var/www/html 2>/dev/null

Update ownership to avoid permission issues

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data * ./

restart apache

sudo systemctl restart apache2

Conclusion

We are now all set. We just need to log in with our database and user info we created earlier. You can do this by going to your web address if you have purchased a public IP or typing in localhost on your web browser.