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

  • neetly@lemmy.worldEnglish
    15·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • Yolk@yiffit.netEnglish
    9·
    2 years ago

    Literally been thinking about this so thank you beautiful brained individual. Would you mind if I shouted this in the YSK group?

  • Eddie@lucitt.socialEnglish
    7·
    2 years ago

    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!!

  • Sergey KozharinovEnglish
    5·
    2 years ago

    The check $LEMMY_HOSTNAME == http* will give a false positive if (for whatever reason) the domain name starts with http

  • untilyouarrived@lemmy.gtfo.socialEnglish
    3·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • redcalcium@c.calciumlabs.comEnglish
    3·
    2 years ago

    Nice! Looks like it even has update checker as well. Is there any reason why pictrs is not included in the update checker and hardcoded to version 0.3.1?

    • ubergeek77@lemmy.ubergeek77.chatOPEnglish
      4·
      2 years ago

      The Lemmy maintainers themselves seem to lock it at 0.3.1, and I wanted to maintain parity with their deployment. I know pictrs is up to at least 0.3.3, and has a release candidate for 0.4, but upstream Lemmy uses 0.3.1 for 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/lemmy is. I could try and pull the latest Gitea tag for pictrs, 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 docker folder right now. The folder in main is completely different from the one tagged 0.17.4. 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.

      • redcalcium@c.calciumlabs.comEnglish
        3·
        2 years ago

        I see, looks like it’s a correct decision to me. Let the Lemmy developers worry about which version of pictrs to use themselves.

  • Manifish_Destiny@kbin.social
    3·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • ubergeek77@lemmy.ubergeek77.chatOP
      5·
      2 years ago

      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.template to import an env_file, that way you can pass anything you want into the container.

  • ipkpjersi@lemmy.oneEnglish
    3·
    2 years ago

    Wow, I’ll definitely look into this, thanks! Even if I don’t use it, it still may be useful just reading through it.

  • Marxine@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    2 years ago

    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!

  • CaptainApathetic@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    2 years ago

    I just made a post about having issues with getting a fully functional instance so I think I’m gonna give this a try.

    • ubergeek77@lemmy.ubergeek77.chatOPEnglish
      4·
      2 years ago

      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.env and set USE_EMAIL to true. 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.

  • kuna@szmer.infoEnglish
    3·
    2 years ago

    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?

  • delcake@lemmy.songsforno.oneEnglish
    2·
    2 years ago

    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.