this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023

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Having trouble deploying Lemmy? Try my new script! Get up and running in minutes! (github.com)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

126 comments fedilink hide all child comments

In the past few days, I've seen a number of people having trouble getting Lemmy set up on their own servers. That motivated me to create Lemmy-Easy-Deploy, a dead-simple solution to deploying Lemmy using Docker Compose under the hood.

To accommodate people new to Docker or self hosting, I've made it as simple as I possibly could. Edit the config file to specify your domain, then run the script. That's it! No manual configuration is needed. Your self hosted Lemmy instance will be up and running in about a minute or less. Everything is taken care of for you. Random passwords are created for Lemmy's microservices, and HTTPS is handled automatically by Caddy.

Updates are automatic too! Run the script again to detect and deploy updates to Lemmy automatically.

If you are an advanced user, plenty of config options are available. You can set this to compile Lemmy from source if you want, which is useful for trying out Release Candidate versions. You can also specify a Cloudflare API token, and if you do, HTTPS certificates will use the DNS challenge instead. This is helpful for Cloudflare proxy users, who can have issues with HTTPS certificates sometimes.

Try it out and let me know what you think!

https://github.com/ubergeek77/Lemmy-Easy-Deploy

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

This was the only tool that I was able to get running. I recommend it to anyone curious about running their own instance. I tried both the official Ansible and Docker instructions, and neither worked.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Marius Hosting published a good guide this week that I used on my nas without an issue (via docker compose).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (6 children)

Threw an error:

Creating lemmy-easy-deploy_pictrs_1 ... 
Creating lemmy-easy-deploy_postgres_1 ... error

ERROR: for lemmy-easy-deploy_postgres_1  Cannot start service postgres: failed to create task for container: failed to create shim task: OCI runtime create failed: runc cr
Creating lemmy-easy-deploy_pictrs_1   ... error: permission denied: unknown

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

You are helping the whole community! Thank you, I will give a try to it, since I'm quite new in self-hosted platform!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Is this easier than the Ansible deployment? That was very straight forward if you’re running a system with apt.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Way cool. Can you provide something for unRaid?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Sorry, I don't have access to an unRaid system to test it with.

However, I know most NAS systems at least support CLI-style Docker and Docker Compose, so if you can manage to get Docker running, it might work? The script has some Docker detection if you're not sure.

However, I know Synology hogs use of port 80 and 443. I'm not sure if unRaid is the same way. If it is, this might not be the best solution for you. But, if you want to give it a shot, I do have some advanced options in my config that lets you change to different ports and turn off HTTPS (so you can run a proxy in front of it). I can't really help people who run it behind a webserver like this, but the template files in my repo can be freely modified, so you're welcome to hack at my script any way you like to get it working!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Any tips on how to customize the favicon for my instance? Using the docker-compose method.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

A bit OT, but worth the shot: can anyone confirm whether instances deployed with this script can be found on Mastodon?

I have tried both the ansible script provided by the developers and I've adapted the docker-compose files to get things running on Docker Swarm. Everything seems to be working well, object storage, federation... except that I can not find any user or community from my instance if I search from Mastodon.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I saw a bug

I see this user who deployed using this script, I click the username link below his name which should lead to server.tld/u/username, but it leads to server.tld/users/username, maybe some kind of dbUser -> outside world configuration is broken?

Also the Bio is different on his local instance and the federated instance?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Hi @[email protected]

I must be doing something wrong here because unlike many others I can't seem to get this working! Please can you offer some advice?

I have amended the config.env file to change the HOSTNAME, SITE NAME and ADMIN USER but left everything else the same.

I then ran ./deploy.sh and everything seems to have worked because it presented me with the admin login credentials and basic instructions to shutdown and start the instance. I tried simply typing the IP address of the docker container in to a browser but that didn't work and TBH I didn't expect it to. I then typed the URL into the browser and I'm getting a "ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS" error message. I read through the trouble shooting on your Github but the only reference to too many redirects mentions a Cloudflare API token, I'm not using Cloudflare nut I am using nginx proxy manager to point my URL to the docker container.

I hope some of this makes sense.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Hey there, please note that running behind a reverse proxy is not supported. You can do it if you want, but you are kinda on your own, sorry.

If it helps, you will probably need to disable Caddy's TLS in the config, and you will need to make sure that the request reaches Caddy via the correct host. You can't reverse proxy directly to port 80 over an IP, it needs to think it's coming from an actual domain.

You can also check out my advanced configuration page to learn how to override the Caddyfile template and roll your own config that is more compatible for your use case.

Good luck!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Thank you so much for replying.

I think this is above my skill level, but I will have a read through your advanced configuration page and see if I can understand it.

Thanks again, but I think I'm going to need more than luck!! LOL

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

You're welcome!

If you're not already, I recommend trying to host this on a cloud VPS service, such as Vultr, Linode, or DigitalOcean. This would give you a reliable, always online Lemmy instance, which means you won't miss any federation data. Even a cheap $5 VPS instance would be enough to get you started, though a $10 would give you more breathing room.

If you're hosting at home, it's generally not a good idea to do that, especially for an application like Lemmy. Most consumer grade network equipment at home might not be equipped to deal with the unrelenting 24/7 flood of data coming in due to federation. And if your power or internet ever goes out, you will be missing any comments, posts, or votes that were sent out during your downtime.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Thank you again. Yeah, I'm trying this from home as opposed to a vps. It's more as a learning exercise than a serious instance.

I'm still going to try and getting it working behind my reverse proxy, like I say, as a learning experience.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (2 children)

So stupid question - how do you shut them down? Docker compose down or stop don't seem to work.

Also, as an intermediate (spoiled Unraid) user, if I'm behind nginx proxy manager with custom ports do I just change 80 and 443 in the lemmy docker-compose? I'm doing this in a Debian VM.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

What adjustments I need to do to run this locally (in my LAN) just for testing?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (9 children)

I haven't tested a local only use case, but you can probably set these options in config.env

Set LEMMY_HOSTNAME to localhost
Set CADDY_DISABLE_TLS to true
Set TLS_ENABLED to false

This will disable any HTTPS certificate generation and only run Lemmy on port 80. I don't know if Caddy or Lemmy will act weird if the hostname is localhost, but this should work for you. Let me know if it doesn't.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

Hey @[email protected], I'm trying this on an Aarm64 instance and the script says it only works on v0.17.4. Is there a plan to update to 0.18?