Last Watch AI - Setup Guide for Windows Users

Andrew Molina

• 2 min read

This guide will walk through the entire setup of Last Watch on Windows Server 2019. These steps should also work for Windows 10.

1. Dependencies

The only dependency to install first is Docker, which will act as the host for Last Watch.

Install Docker Desktop on Windows
How to install Docker Desktop for Windows
Docker Documentation

Docker for Windows uses a built-in Windows service called Hyper-V to host its containers. If you have not set up Hyper-V before, follow the Docker documentation to enable it on your server.

If you are using Windows 10 instead of Windows Server, you may be forced to use WSL2, which is fine. Last Watch has been tested on both Hyper-V and WSL2.

Once Docker is up and running, you may want to tweak some settings:

  • Set to start up with Windows
  • CPU - assign at least 2 cores
  • Memory - assign 4GB (Last Watch was tested with 4GB. Most of the memory is used by the AI. You may be able to get away with less, but performance could be impacted)
  • Disk Size - 20 GB should be more than enough

2. Download and Un-zip Last Watch

  1. Download the latest release from Github: https://github.com/akmolina28/last-watch-ai/releases
  2. Extract the zipped folder to the installation directory of your choice. Usually this would be somewhere on the main OS drive.

3. Configuration

Edit the .env file in the root folder with the desired settings:

  1. WATCH_FOLDER - path to the input folder. Last Watch will watch this folder for new image files and feed them into your automation profiles.

More settings are in development, such as custom port numbers.

4. Run

In a new Command Prompt or Powershell:

> cd /path/to/last-watch

> docker-compose up -d --build site

The first time you run this command it may take several minutes to download the docker images. Docker-compose will spin up several containers that host the web app, the database, and the Deepstack AI engine.

You need to run this command again any time you want to start up Last Watch. If you set Docker to start up with Windows, it will automatically restart the containers for you.

If you want to stop the containers, run docker-compose down.

5. Open the Web App

Navigate to http://localhost:8080 to bring up the app.

Upgrading

  1. Download the latest release zip and extract the files into a new folder.
  2. Stop all existing containers: docker-compose down
  3. Replace the mysql folder in the new installation with a copy from your existing installation. This will copy over all of your old data.
  4. Copy the .env file from your old install to your new install.
  5. If you are using masks, copy the mask files from your old install to your new install (they are in src/storage/app/public/masks).
  6. Run migrations to bring your database up to date: docker-compose run --rm artisan migrate
  7. Restart the containers: docker-compose up -d --build site