Deployment

Stirling Image ships as a single Docker container. The frontend, API, and Python AI runtime all run inside one image. The image supports linux/amd64 and linux/arm64, so it runs natively on Intel/AMD servers, Apple Silicon Macs, and ARM devices like the Raspberry Pi 4/5.

Docker Compose (recommended)

services:
  stirling-image:
    image: stirlingimage/stirling-image:latest
    container_name: stirling-image
    ports:
      - "1349:1349"
    volumes:
      - stirling-data:/data
      - stirling-workspace:/tmp/workspace
    environment:
      - AUTH_ENABLED=true
      - DEFAULT_USERNAME=admin
      - DEFAULT_PASSWORD=admin
    restart: unless-stopped

volumes:
  stirling-data:
  stirling-workspace:

docker compose up -d

The app is then available at http://localhost:1349.

What's inside the container

The Docker image uses a multi-stage build:

1. Build stage -- Installs Node.js dependencies and builds the React frontend with Vite.
2. Production stage -- Copies the built frontend and API source into a Node 22 image, installs system dependencies (Python 3, ImageMagick, Tesseract, potrace), sets up a Python virtual environment with all ML packages, and pre-downloads model weights.

Everything runs from a single process. The Fastify server handles API requests and serves the frontend SPA.

System dependencies installed in the image

• Python 3 with pip
• ImageMagick
• Tesseract OCR
• libraw (RAW image support)
• potrace (bitmap to vector conversion)

Python packages

• rembg with BiRefNet-Lite (background removal)
• RealESRGAN (upscaling)
• PaddleOCR (text recognition)
• MediaPipe (face detection)
• LaMa Cleaner (inpainting/object removal)
• onnxruntime, opencv-python, Pillow, numpy

Model weights are downloaded at build time, so the container works fully offline.

Architecture notes

All core image tools (resize, crop, compress, convert, watermark, etc.) work on both amd64 and arm64. Some ML packages (PaddleOCR, MediaPipe, LaMa Cleaner) have limited arm64 support and may be unavailable on ARM systems. The container logs a warning for any package that could not be installed and falls back gracefully — Tesseract handles OCR and Lanczos handles upscaling when the ML alternatives are missing.

Volumes

Mount these to persist data:

Mount point	Purpose
/data	SQLite database (users, API keys, pipelines, settings)
/tmp/workspace	Temporary image processing files

The /data volume is the important one. Without it, you lose all user accounts and saved pipelines on container restart. The workspace volume is optional but prevents the container's writable layer from growing.

Health check

The container includes a health check that hits GET /api/v1/health. Docker uses this to report container status:

docker inspect --format='{{.State.Health.Status}}' stirling-image

Reverse proxy

If you're running Stirling Image behind nginx or Caddy, point it at port 1349. Example nginx config:

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name images.example.com;

    client_max_body_size 200M;

    location / {
        proxy_pass http://localhost:1349;
        proxy_http_version 1.1;
        proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
        proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
    }
}

Set client_max_body_size to match your MAX_UPLOAD_SIZE_MB value.

CI/CD

The GitHub repository has two workflows:

• release.yml -- On release, builds multi-arch Docker images (amd64 + arm64) and pushes to both Docker Hub (stirlingimage/stirling-image) and GitHub Container Registry (ghcr.io/stirling-image/stirling-image).
• deploy-docs.yml -- Builds this documentation site and deploys it to GitHub Pages.

Both run automatically. No manual steps needed after merging to main.