Operations & Maintenance

Day-to-day tasks for a self-hosted AdventureLog instance: updates, backups, validation, and the installer management menu.

Management menu

If you installed via the Quick Start Installer, re-run it to open the interactive management menu:

curl -sSL https://get.adventurelog.app | bash

Or from your install directory:

bash install_adventurelog.sh --manage

Available actions:

Action	What it does
Status	Shows container health and /health endpoint
Update	Pulls latest images and redeploys (optional backup first)
Reconfigure	Re-runs the configuration wizard
Backup	Runs scripts/backup.sh
Restore	Runs scripts/restore.sh from a backup folder
Logs	Follows container logs
Restart	Restarts the compose stack
Uninstall	Stops containers, removes volumes

Compose file detection

scripts/deploy.sh, scripts/backup.sh, and scripts/restore.sh auto-detect your setup:

Condition	Compose file	Env file
Only .env exists	docker-compose.yml	.env
Only .env.advanced exists	docker/docker-compose.advanced.yml	.env.advanced
ADVENTURELOG_COMPOSE=advanced with both env files	docker/docker-compose.advanced.yml	.env.advanced
Otherwise	docker-compose.yml	.env

Override manually:

COMPOSE_FILE=docker/docker-compose.advanced.yml bash scripts/deploy.sh --backup

Always pass --env-file when running docker compose directly:

docker compose --env-file .env ps

Updating

See Updating for full details. Quick reference:

# Recommended — validates env, backs up, pulls, and waits for health
bash scripts/deploy.sh --backup

# Advanced Deployment with explicit compose file
COMPOSE_FILE=docker/docker-compose.advanced.yml bash scripts/deploy.sh --backup

Backup

scripts/backup.sh creates a timestamped folder under backups/ containing:

• Your env file (.env or .env.advanced)
• PostgreSQL dump (database.sql)
• Media volume archive (media.tar.gz)

bash scripts/backup.sh
# Custom output directory:
BACKUP_DIR=/mnt/backups bash scripts/backup.sh

Restore

bash scripts/restore.sh backups/20260101-120000

This stops the stack, restores env + database + media, and brings containers back up.

Environment validation

Run before every deploy or after editing env files:

bash scripts/validate-env.sh
bash scripts/validate-env.sh .env
bash scripts/validate-env.sh .env.advanced

The validator catches common mistakes such as PUBLIC_SERVER_URL pointing at the host backend port instead of the internal Docker service name.

Image GPS backfill

New uploads and imports store GPS coordinates on ContentImage records when EXIF or Immich metadata is available. Images imported before this feature, or stored as WEBP without retained EXIF, may not have coordinates until you backfill them.

Run inside the backend container:

docker compose exec server python3 manage.py backfill_image_coordinates

Useful options:

Flag	Purpose
--dry-run	Show what would be updated without saving
--user-id ID	Limit to one user's images
--batch-size N	Progress logging interval (default 100)
--force	Re-extract even when coordinates already exist
--verbose	Log each processed image

The command tries, in order:

1. Local file — reads the stored image and extracts EXIF GPS (may fail for WEBP conversions that stripped metadata)
2. Immich reference — fetches GPS from the linked Immich asset when immich_id is set and the user has an Immich integration

After backfill, geotagged images appear on maps when Photo locations is enabled in the map display options.

First boot behavior