Empowering Your Visual Content: A Guide to Running Your Own Image Host

Running your own image host is a wise choice for anyone in the homelab scene. Here’s why: When you post images using other third-party services such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (X), or Imgur, you grant them rights to use or in some cases own your images. By self-hosting your images, you can maintain greater control over the quality, privacy, and distribution of your content.

Here’s how I set up my own image host:
For my homelab environment, I chose xBackbone as my image host. xBackbone is a powerful open-source framework that facilitates the development of web applications with Backbone.js.

This article will walk you through the process of setting up xBackbone in a Docker container using Docker Compose.

I chose to containerize it for future scalability.

Prerequisites

Before we begin, make sure you have the following prerequisites in place:

Docker installed on your system. If you haven’t installed Docker yet, visit Docker’s official website for installation instructions.
Docker Compose should also be installed. You can follow these instructions to install it.

Step 1: Create a Directory Structure

Create a directory for your xBackbone project and navigate to it. Within this directory, you will need to create a docker-compose.yml file, which is used to define your application’s services and their configuration.

mkdir my-xbackbone-app
cd my-xbackbone-app
touch docker-compose.yml

Step 2: Configure docker-compose.yml

Open the docker-compose.yml file in your favorite text editor and add the following content:

version: '3'
services:
  xbackbone:
    image: your-xbackbone-image:tag
    ports:
      - 8080:80
    volumes:
      - ./app:/var/www/html

Replace your-xbackbone-image:tag with the Docker image you want to use for xBackbone. This configuration sets up a service named “xbackbone” and maps port 8080 on your host to port 80 inside the container.

Step 3: Create a Dockerfile

You’ll need a Dockerfile in the same directory to build your custom xBackbone image. Here’s a basic Dockerfile for reference:

FROM nginx:alpine

COPY ./app /var/www/html

Step 4: Build and Run the Container

Build your custom image using the docker build command:

docker build -t your-xbackbone-image:tag .

Once the image is built, you can start the xBackbone container using Docker Compose:

docker-compose up

Step 5: Access Your xBackbone Application

Open a web browser and navigate to http://localhost:8080 to access your xBackbone application running inside the Docker container.

You’ve successfully set up xBackbone in a Docker container using Docker Compose. This approach allows you to easily manage and deploy your xBackbone application, making development and testing a breeze. Enjoy developing your web applications with xBackbone in a controlled and isolated environment!