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Is public sharing available for self-hosted instances? ​

Yes.

You'll need to run two instances of the web app, one is regular web app, but another one is the same code but running on a different origin (i.e. on a different hostname or different port).

Then, you need to tell the regular web app to use your second instance to service public links. You can do this by setting the NEXT_PUBLIC_ENTE_ALBUMS_ENDPOINT to point to your second instance when running or building the regular web app.

For more details, see .env and .env.development.

As a concrete example, assuming we have a Ente server running on localhost:8080, we can start two instances of the web app, passing them NEXT_PUBLIC_ENTE_ALBUMS_ENDPOINT that points to the origin ("scheme://host[:port]") of the second "albums" instance.

The first one, the normal web app

sh
NEXT_PUBLIC_ENTE_ENDPOINT=http://localhost:8080 \
    NEXT_PUBLIC_ENTE_ALBUMS_ENDPOINT=http://localhost:3002 \
    yarn dev:photos

The second one, the same code but acting as the "albums" app (the only difference is the port it is running on):

sh
NEXT_PUBLIC_ENTE_ENDPOINT=http://localhost:8080 \
    NEXT_PUBLIC_ENTE_ALBUMS_ENDPOINT=http://localhost:3002 \
    yarn dev:albums

If you also want to change the prefix (the origin) in the generated public links, to use your custom albums endpoint in the generated public link instead of albums.ente.io, set apps.public-albums property in museum's configuration

For example, when running using the starter docker compose file, you can do this by creating a museum.yaml and defining the following configuration there:

yaml
apps:
    public-albums: http://localhost:3002

(For more details, see local.yaml in the server's source code).

Dockerfile example ​

Here is an example of a Dockerfile by @Dylanger on our community Discord. This runs a standalone self-hosted version of the public albums app in production mode.

Dockerfile
FROM node:20-alpine as builder

WORKDIR /app
COPY . .

ARG NEXT_PUBLIC_ENTE_ENDPOINT=https://your.ente.example.org
ARG NEXT_PUBLIC_ENTE_ALBUMS_ENDPOINT=https://your.albums.example.org

RUN yarn install && yarn build

FROM node:20-alpine

WORKDIR /app
COPY --from=builder /app/apps/photos/out .

RUN npm install -g serve

ENV PORT=3000
EXPOSE ${PORT}

CMD serve -s . -l tcp://0.0.0.0:${PORT}

Note that this only runs the public albums app, but the same principle can be used to run both the normal Ente photos app and the public albums app. There is a slightly more involved example showing how to do this also provided by in a community contributed guide about configuring external S3.

You will also want to tell museum about your custom shared albums endpoint so that it uses that instead of the default URL when creating share links. You can configure that in museum's config.yaml:

apps:
    public-albums: https://your.albums.example.org