ente/server

Museum

API server for ente.io

We named our server museum because for us and our customers, personal photos are worth more than any other piece of art.

Both Ente Photos and Ente Auth use the same server (intentionally). This allows users to use the same credentials to store different types of end-to-end encrypted data without needing to create new accounts. We plan on building more apps using the same server – this is easy, because the server is already data agnostic (since the data is end-to-end encrypted).

Getting started

Start a local cluster

docker compose up --build

And that's it!

You can now make API requests to localhost, for example

curl http://localhost:8080/ping

Let's try changing the message to get the hang of things. Open healthcheck.go, change "pong" to "kong", stop the currently running cluster (Ctrl-c), and then rerun it

docker compose up --build

And ping again

curl http://localhost:8080/ping

This time you'll see the updated message.

For more details about how to get museum up and running, see RUNNING.

Tip

Also, there is a way to use our pre-built Docker images to directly start a cluster without needing to clone this repository - see docs/docker.

Architecture

With the mechanics of running museum out of the way, let us revisit the diagram we saw earlier.

It is a long term goal of ours to make museum redundant. The beauty of an end-to-end encrypted architecture is that the service provider has no special conceptual role. The user has full ownership of the data at all points, and using suitably advanced clients the cloud storage and replication can be abstracted away, or be handled in a completely decentralized manner.

Until we get there, museum serves as an assistant for various housekeeping chores.

• Clients (mobile, web and desktop) connect to museum on the user's behalf. Museum then proxies data access (after adding yet another layer of authentication on top of the user's master password), performs billing related functions, and triggers replication of encrypted user data.

• The end-to-end encrypted cryptography that powers all this is documented here

• Details about the 3 (yes 3!) clouds where the encrypted data and database are replicated to are documented here

Museum's architecture is generic enough to support arbitrary end-to-end encrypted storage. While we're currently focusing on building a great photo storage and sharing experience, that's not a limit. For example, we already use museum to also provide an end-to-end encrypted open source 2FA app with cloud backups.

Self hosting

Museum is a single self-contained Docker image that is easy to self-host.

When we write code for museum, the guiding light is simplicity and robustness. But this also extends to how we approach hosting. Museum is a single statically compiled binary that can be put anywhere and directly run.

And it is built with containerization in mind - both during development and deployment. Just use the provided Dockerfile, configure to taste and you're off to the races.

Overall, there are three approaches you can take:

• Run using Docker using a pre-built Docker image
• Run using Docker but build an image from source
• Run without Docker

Everything that you might needed to run museum is all in here, since this is the setup we ourselves use in production.

Tip

On our production servers, we wrap museum in a systemd service. Our production machines are vanilla Ubuntu images, with Docker and Promtail installed. We then plonk in this systemd service, and use systemctl start|stop|status museum to herd it around.

Some people new to Docker/Go/Postgres might have general questions though. Unfortunately, because of limited engineering bandwidth we will currently not be able to prioritize support queries related to self hosting, and we request you to please not open issues around self hosting for the time being (feel free to create discussions though). The best way to summarize the status of self hosting is – everything you need is here, but it is perhaps not readily documented, or flexible enough.

That said, we hope community members help each other out, e.g. in this repository's Discussions, or on our Discord. And whenever time permits, we will try to clarify, and also document such FAQs. Please feel free to open documentation PRs around this too.

Tip

You can find more guides and documentation around self-hosting at help.ente.io/self-hosting.

Thanks ❤️

We've had great fun with this combination (Golang + Postgres + Docker), and we hope you also have fun tinkering with it too. A big thank you to all the people who've put in decades of work behind these great technologies. Truly, on the shoulders of giants we stand.