Help standing up a self-hosted Lemmy instance

TerryMathews@lemmy.world to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 9 points –

I'm trying to stand up a Lemmy instance, and for some reason I'm just not getting it. I've got a fair bit of experience in Linux and Docker. NPM is new to me, but doesn't seem difficult.

I've looked over several walkthroughs but it seems like they all don't quite work right. Does someone have a clear step-by-step that works, or could take the time to remote in and help me get this up?

I'm running on VMWare ESXi, and I've tried both Debian and Ubuntu to get the server up. Closest I got, the Docker containers would start but seem to be throwing errors internally and don't connect to one another.

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I did. I could never get ansible to work when I was setting up the same machine. If you know how to set the inventory file up for that, I'm all ears.

I'm just going through it now. I'll keep you posted

I'm currently hitting an issue of lets encrypt failing to authenticate using the .well-known. The domain in the hosts file is lemmy.domain.com though I have a feeling this may have to be the FQDN. the base domain is currently being used by matrix to serve antoher .well-known so it looks like I'll have to add another page there somewhere.

yes, the domain in the hosts file needs to be the fqdn. Let's encrypt will look for the auth file at the root of that. if you are already using this fqdn/webroot you'll need another cname.

I don't think I'm using the root for anything, just domain.com/.well-known/matrix/server. Would I be able to serve the challenge at domain.com/.well-known/acme-challenge/stringofcharacters?

I think so. letsencrypt will only be looking for the file that certbot creates, so as long as it can resolve the fqdn to your host and port 80 (http://yourdoma.in) is navigable, then you should be good.

certbot certonly --manual is what I need though I think cloudflare or something else is making it only resolve to https. I'm going to shelf this for now and come back to it later. Thanks for your help

Ansible was a breeze once I got it going.

I could never get ansible to work when I was setting up the same machine.

Could you post your inventory file?

Sorry that these are screenshots and not files, but I'm working through Chrome Remote Desktop so my options are a bit limited. This is what I get when I execute 'ansible-playbook -i inventory/hosts lemmy.yml' regardless of whether I have it set to terry@ or root@, and whether I use --become or not.

Maybe you've already looked into this, but I checked the playbook and the error above is occuring when Ansible tries to run this command:

test -e /usr/bin/python || (apt -y update && apt install -y python3-minimal python3-setuptools)

If you manually run the part of the command in parentheses above you'll probably get the Release file error also listed above, and from there you might be able to find out what's up. I think that error usually has to do with your repository setup and/or the version of Ubuntu youre running, but Google can hopefully tell you for sure.