External Storage

[tnolen-cmd]

I've got a smallish VM running Docker/Portainer and since the storage requirements can get upward of 200GB, I'd like to store the majority of data on my NAS. I've done this with an Immich server running on the same machine, but what is the best way with Reitti? I have a SMB mount on the host for the NAS. Would I just point the - postgis-data:/var/lib/postgresql/data to a path on my NAS under my mount?
The docs seemed to indicate that the majority of the data is in the PostgreSQL database.

[dgraf-gh]

HI @tnolen-cmd,

you are right reitti on its own only stores data in the database. For that change

  postgis:
    volumes:
      - postgis-data:/var/lib/postgresql/data

to

  postgis:
    volumes:
      - YOUR_STORAGE_PATH:/var/lib/postgresql/data

you could further remove the postgis-data volume out of the volumes section.

Additionaly you should make sure that Photon has an external storage. That would actually be more important than the database.
For that change:

  photon:
    image: rtuszik/photon-docker:1.0.0
    environment:
      - UPDATE_STRATEGY=PARALLEL
      - REGION=de #set your main country code here to save space or drop this line to fetch the whole index.
    volumes:
      - photon-data:/photon/data

to

  photon:
    image: rtuszik/photon-docker:1.0.0
    environment:
      - UPDATE_STRATEGY=PARALLEL
      - REGION=de #set your main country code here to save space or drop this line to fetch the whole index.
    volumes:
      - YOUR_STORAGE_PATH:/photon/data

replace YOUR_STORAGE_PATH with seprate paths for photon and postgis and make sure that booth paths are writeable to the container users. I do not have the needed permissions at hand right now.

[tnolen-cmd]

Sorry to be a noob, but I'm unable to get this to work. My mount point on the docker host is /reitti and I want to be able to know what folder this container is in on the NAS, so I have a reitti folder there, making my full path /reitti/reitti. To avoid permission issues, I'm using 777 on everything for now.

I've tried:

postgis:
    image: postgis/postgis:17-3.5-alpine
    environment:
      POSTGRES_USER: reitti
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: reitti
      POSTGRES_DB: reittidb
    volumes:
      - /reitti/reitti/var/lib/postgresql/data`

As well as:

postgis:
    image: postgis/postgis:17-3.5-alpine
    environment:
      POSTGRES_USER: reitti
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: reitti
      POSTGRES_DB: reittidb
    volumes:
      - /reitti/reitti:/var/lib/postgresql/data`

Which is closer to the substitution you mentioned.

Similarly, these were accompanied by:

photon:
    image: rtuszik/photon-docker:1.0.0
    environment:
      - UPDATE_STRATEGY=PARALLEL
      - REGION=us #set your main country code here to save space or drop this line to fetch the whole index.
    volumes:
      - /reitti/reitti/photon/data`

And

photon:
    image: rtuszik/photon-docker:1.0.0
    environment:
      - UPDATE_STRATEGY=PARALLEL
      - REGION=us #set your main country code here to save space or drop this line to fetch the whole index.
    volumes:
      - /reitti/reitti:/photon/data`

Respectively.

I was able to deploy the stack but nothing ever populated in the paths and the reitti-photon-1 container gets stuck starting for a while before failing. I tried pre-creating the folders under my /reitti/reitti/ path, but that didn't help.

I checked the logs, and it looks like the download is not ever completing:
2025-09-14 22:42:53,187 - root - INFO - Validating environment variables...
2025-09-14 22:42:53,187 - root - INFO - Environment variables are valid.
2025-09-14 22:42:53,187 - root - INFO - Starting initial download using sequential strategy
2025-09-14 22:42:53,187 - root - INFO - Note: Initial download will use sequential strategy regardless of config setting
2025-09-14 22:42:53,187 - root - INFO - Starting sequential download process...
2025-09-14 22:42:53,187 - root - INFO - Deleting old index...
2025-09-14 22:42:53,625 - root - INFO - Sequential update space requirements:
2025-09-14 22:42:53,626 - root - INFO - Download size: 19.90 GB
2025-09-14 22:42:53,626 - root - INFO - Estimated extracted size: 32.44 GB
2025-09-14 22:42:53,626 - root - INFO - Temp space needed: 52.35 GB
2025-09-14 22:42:53,626 - root - INFO - Temp space available: 74.64 GB
2025-09-14 22:42:53,626 - root - INFO - Sufficient disk space available for update
2025-09-14 22:42:53,626 - root - INFO - Downloading new index and MD5 checksum...
2025-09-14 22:42:54,066 - root - INFO - Starting download of 19.90GB to photon-db-latest.tar.bz2
2025-09-14 22:43:04,078 - root - INFO - Download progress: 1.9% (0.38GB / 19.90GB) - 327.9 Mbps - ETA: 0h 8m
2025-09-14 22:43:14,091 - root - INFO - Download progress: 3.9% (0.77GB / 19.90GB) - 334.8 Mbps - ETA: 0h 8m
2025-09-14 22:43:24,091 - root - INFO - Download progress: 6.0% (1.19GB / 19.90GB) - 357.3 Mbps - ETA: 0h 7m
...truncated
2025-09-14 22:46:24,589 - root - INFO - Download progress: 37.9% (7.54GB / 19.90GB) - 339.7 Mbps - ETA: 0h 5m
2025-09-14 22:46:44,725 - root - WARNING - Download attempt 1 failed: HTTPSConnectionPool(host='r2.koalasec.org', port=443): Read timed out.
2025-09-14 22:46:44,725 - root - INFO - Retrying download (attempt 2/3)...
2025-09-14 22:46:45,155 - root - INFO - Starting download of 19.90GB to photon-db-latest.tar.bz2
2025-09-14 22:46:55,155 - root - INFO - Download progress: 1.1% (0.21GB / 19.90GB) - 181.2 Mbps - ETA: 0h 15m
2025-09-14 22:47:05,161 - root - INFO - Download progress: 4.0% (0.80GB / 19.90GB) - 505.3 Mbps - ETA: 0h 5m
2025-09-14 22:47:15,161 - root - INFO - Download progress: 7.0% (1.40GB / 19.90GB) - 515.2 Mbps - ETA: 0h 5m
2025-09-14 22:47:38,176 - root - WARNING - Download attempt 2 failed: HTTPSConnectionPool(host='r2.koalasec.org', port=443): Read timed out.

The next one timed out as well, resulting in failure. Not sure why it wold download at 200-500 Mbit only to time out every time.

The temporary download does not seem to be going to the NAS and could potentially fill up the host, if those temp downloads are normally large. Is there a way to make the temp downloads also go to the NAS path?

[tnolen-cmd]

OK, I guess it kept trying to download, so it is up and running, but I still have not been able to get the container to utilize the NAS storage. Nothing is touched there. Please see my examples above and let me know what I'm doing incorrectly.

[dgraf-gh]

Hi @tnolen-cmd,

I never checked where photon is downloading it's index. We are using this https://github.com/rtuszik/photon-docker.
Maybe ask on their repo.

    volumes:
      - /reitti/reitti:/var/lib/postgresql/data

this is the correct syntax. I would do one folder for postgis and one for photon.

postgis:
   ...
    volumes:
      - /reitti/db:/var/lib/postgresql/data
photon:
    image: rtuszik/photon-docker:1.0.0
    environment:
      - UPDATE_STRATEGY=PARALLEL
      - REGION=us #set your main country code here to save space or drop this line to fetch the whole index.
    volumes:
      - /reitti/photon:photon/data`

after you startup the containers there should be data in these folder.

I will try to verify that today.