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!
As someone who spent hours figuring out how to deploy through Ansible, how dare you /s But seriously thank you for putting in the work to make creating an instance more attainable for people.
Literally been thinking about this so thank you beautiful brained individual. Would you mind if I shouted this in the YSK group?
Thank you very much for the kind words!
Please be my guest! It would make me happy to know this was helping people join Lemmy!
Really awesome work. We need more Lemmy servers!
seriously, distributing the load helps a LOT. Though if you can’t spin up your own instance one thing you can do is try and host pictures externally, in !youshouldknow!youshouldknow@lemmy.world a post mentioned how to do it for images in comments since by default it has you upload if you don’t manually put in
Can you point to the post ? Didn’t found it
Been pounding my head against the desk for the last TWO DAYS trying to get everything to work. Then you came along and solved all of my problems and it only took me 10 minutes to set up (mostly due to waiting on DNS to flush!)
THANK YOU SO MUCH for creating this, and PLEASE continue to maintain! I will gib coffees if need be along the way!!
The check
$LEMMY_HOSTNAME == http*will give a false positive if (for whatever reason) the domain name starts with httpThanks! Fix pushed.
I’m relatively competent installing server software, but the Lemmy instructions completely flummoxed me. Their docker instructions just don’t work.
I ended up using the ansible docker scripts and filling out the blanks because I’m unfamiliar with ansible.
If this is as good as it sounds, you’re doing everyone a massive favour.
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Nice! Looks like it even has update checker as well. Is there any reason why
pictrsis not included in the update checker and hardcoded to version 0.3.1?The Lemmy maintainers themselves seem to lock it at 0.3.1, and I wanted to maintain parity with their deployment. I know
pictrsis up to at least0.3.3, and has a release candidate for0.4, but upstream Lemmy uses0.3.1for whatever reason, so that’s why I lock it there.It’s excluded from the update checker because I don’t have a stable way to check what version upstream is using. The Lemmy update checker just checks to see what the latest tag on
LemmyNet/lemmyis. I could try and pull the latest Gitea tag forpictrs, but since upstream Lemmy isn’t using the latest version, that’s not really an option as something might break.I considered trying to parse their docker-compose.yml file to see what version they use, but they seem to be restructuring their
dockerfolder right now. The folder inmainis completely different from the one tagged0.17.4. If I assume a certain directory path for that file for every version after this, but they move it, my script will break. Sadly, until their Docker deployment files seem like they’re going unchanged for a good few versions, I’ll have to do it manually for now.I see, looks like it’s a correct decision to me. Let the Lemmy developers worry about which version of pictrs to use themselves.
Looks great my dude.
If you expanded out the environment variables a ton, making it more customizable, (with default values in place of couse) this could appeal to a huge range of people.Can you explain? I provide an interface for everything available in
lemmy.hjson, so I am not sure what else I would add.I will note though, this is primarily intended for beginners. More advanced users would probably prefer to manage this on their own with Docker Compose, and those people will be very well versed in messing with the environment variables and all that.
If there are variables you want to pass in, you can simply edit
docker-compose.yml.templateto import anenv_file, that way you can pass anything you want into the container.
Wow, I’ll definitely look into this, thanks! Even if I don’t use it, it still may be useful just reading through it.
You kind Sir/Lady/Gentleperson are making the fediverse a better place with this help. Thanks a bunch, gonna definitely ease my attempts at eventually self-hosting!
Will try this tomorrow. Tried them all. Nothing seems to work! I have been at it the whole week trying.
I just made a post about having issues with getting a fully functional instance so I think I’m gonna give this a try.
I hope it works out for you!
Quick note: For email, pretty much every VPS provider out there blocks port 25, which is needed for emails to send. They do this to prevent spam emails from being sent en-masse from their servers. This is likely why your Ansible installation is not sending emails.
Since it’s uncommon for servers to support email, this script disables it by default. If your provider supports port 25 (or you get approved to use it, some VPS providers allow you to request access), check
config.envand setUSE_EMAILtotrue. This will set up everything you need for email.I haven’t been able to test email, so let me know how it works if you do! This doesn’t do any of the DNS verification some email provders require, so your emails might be sent to spam. Lemmy doesn’t really have documentation about how to set this up properly. If someone makes guidelines for this, I can update my project to do that automatically as well.
Do I understand it correctly that this script only works if it can set up it’s own Caddy, and if I already run nginx to reverse proxy stuff on my server, then this isn’t for me?
You can try changing the ports in
docker-compose.yml.template. I just use Caddy in this because its HTTPS convenience is hard to beat!Thanks!
Thanks for the helpful tool! Posting this from my new single-user Lemmy instance. I ended up tweaking the compose template a bit to remove Caddy since I already have it running on this VPS for other services. Wasn’t too bad to just take the Caddyfile information and add it to my own existing framework.
