Frigate NVR on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS by cloudimg

Frigate NVR on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS by cloudimg

Frigate is an open source network video recorder built around realtime object detection. Instead of triggering on raw pixel change the way a traditional motion recorder does, Frigate runs each camera stream through a detection model and tells you that a person, a car or an animal was seen, where it was, and for how long. Motion detection fires on headlights, rain, moving shadows and swaying branches. Object detection does not, so the alerts you get are the ones worth looking at and the recordings you keep are the ones worth keeping.

Everything happens on your own VM. Frames are never sent to a cloud service, the detection model runs locally, and the recordings stay on your disk.

### CPU only detection, and what that honestly means

This image ships the CPU detector. There is no Coral TPU, no GPU and no TensorRT in it, and it does not pretend otherwise. Upstream logs a warning at every start that CPU detectors are recommended only for testing or trial purposes, and this listing repeats that rather than hiding it.

Read it as: CPU detection genuinely works and is genuinely useful at small scale. On the recommended `Standard_B2ms` (2 vCPU, 8 GiB) expect one to two cameras with the detect substream at 640x480 and 5 fps, recording by stream copy with no transcoding. `Standard_B4ms` carries three to four. Beyond that you want a hardware accelerator, which an image for general purpose VM sizes cannot provide. If you are evaluating Frigate, covering a home or a small site, or proving out zones and object rules before investing in hardware, this is a good fit.

### You supply the cameras

No camera address and no camera credential is ever baked into this image. It ships a valid configuration with zero cameras, which upstream explicitly supports, so the interface comes up on a fresh VM and you add your own cameras through the wizard. That is the state you receive and it is a fully working state.

### Closed to anonymous callers on every route

An unprotected NVR streams your cameras to whoever finds it, so this appliance is gated hard. Frigate listens on two ports and they are not equivalent: upstream documents port 5000 as internal and treats requests arriving there as admin with no authentication, which would disclose your camera URLs and passwords. Both of Frigate's ports are bound to loopback only. An nginx gate on port 80 is the sole ingress and is default deny at server scope, so every route inherits it, including the API, the stream endpoints and the websocket. Exactly one route is open and it is a static health literal that never reaches Frigate.

Frigate's own authentication is left enabled as a real second layer with its own per VM admin password, so passing the gate is not the same as being signed in.

No default password exists. A unique gate credential and a unique Frigate admin password are generated on each VM at first boot, and nginx will not start until first boot has proved, against a throwaway loopback listener, that an anonymous request is answered with exactly 401 and that a mutated credential is refused.

### What is in the image

• Frigate NVR 0.17.2, the official upstream image pinned by digest and bound to upstream commit `3d4dd3a` by the image's own version string
• Google's Apache-2.0 `ssdlite_mobiledet_coco` CPU detection model
• Embedded SQLite storage, with no database server of any kind installed
• A shipped dependency licence inventory covering all 959 Python and frontend dependencies, with zero AGPL, SSPL, BSL, Elastic or non commercial licences
• The verbatim configuration of every bundled ffmpeg build, recorded on the VM

Conservative retention defaults ship so that adding a camera cannot silently fill the disk, and recordings are stored `0750 root:root` and are never served from disk by the gate.

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*Frigate, Frigate NVR and the Frigate logo are trademarks of Frigate, Inc. This image is produced by cloudimg and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Frigate, Inc. It ships the free and open source MIT licensed software, unmodified.*