Want to selfhost a Lemmy server
Hey. I really like the idea of the fediverse and Lemmy and would want to know as a beginner/not so experienced regarding selfhosting what would be the best way to get started? I saw there are vps options, but don't know of I'm looking in the right direction.
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Personally... it was an experience to say the least. I went down the Docker path for my instance. I've tried to keep away from Docker for ages, but here I am.
I'd recommend using the ansible playbook to get it running, as the docker documentation isn't very detailed and it gets very confusing; especially for a beginner.
The docker documentation is not kept in sync with the docker-compose.yml it asks you to use. So you download the latest one as per instructions, but that's being regularly updated with no thought to the documentation also being updated. It's also doesn't seem aimed at production deployment, just developer test environments. Then there are stupid simple things like the port number being changed in the docker-compose.yml but not in the nginx.conf or the lemmy.hjson. There desperately needs to be better control of that.
There is a lot wrong there and it doesn't fill me with confidence. It took me 3 hours to piece it all together last night and had to revert to picking bits out of the ansible documentation.
Right? Thank you for confirming that I'm not extremely stupid when I didn't manage to get the docker installation working, only the Ansible one.
Exactly, I’ve spent ages yesterday and today trying to piece together a set of configs that all work together. I thought it must have been me missing something because the last time I did it everything worked exactly as described in the documentation and it took about ten minutes to get a working instance up and running, but not this time!
It helps slightly (slightly!) if you refer to the configs from the last release rather than the ones on the main branch that are constantly being changed, but even then you’ll have to maybe use the docker-compose.yml from the Ansible repo if you don’t want to build nginx as part of the docker install.
Got there in the end though!
Turns out I can't upload photos due to the config file they point you at being wrong. Ffs! Direct users to a labelled release and production version. At the moment it's chaos at the very time it needs to be as seemless as possible.
I thought I was going crazy. I'm glad I wasn't the only one having issues.
thanks, wanted to go that route
Make sure you use a Debian base OS, as the playbook uses aptitude to install the dependencies. Also, you can't use anything over Debian 11, as the way the apt repositories and gpg keys are added, and the pip packages are installed don't work with the newer OS'.
I found out the hard way lol
The fact that this wasn't in their install instructions made waste multiple hours yesterday. Eventually got a server working on Ubuntu 22. But then after starting to subscribe to other communities my server stopped responding Soni gave up
Did you start with arch or something 😂 sounds like you went through it lol
Not even ha, just tried to install on Debian 12
Did you get it to run on docker? My personal instance is running, federation and community search semm to be working but when I subscribe to something it just says "pending" and does not seem to actually go through
I did, yes. It took me a few hours of troubleshooting though, spanned across two days. I'm using Nginx Proxy Manager instead of the Nginx proxy that comes with Lemmy, but it all translates similarly. I also followed this guide on YouTube.
If it's sitting there saying "pending" for your subscriptions, it may be that the "proxpass /" location ports are off by one. It'll look like it's federating properly, but really it isn't. That was one thing I noticed with the documentation/examples; things were off and not updated. Check my screenshot attached for what I mean. The documentation/example config for the proxy lists the Lemmy-ui port as 1235, but it's actually 1236.
Screenshot
Hopefully that makes sense. If I can be of any more assistance, let me know!!
Thanks! I'll check the video and I'll double check my configuration. The example compose file and config files already needed some tweaking for me to get to this point but maybe I've missed something.
+1 for Docker, specifically Docker Compose. Lemmy probably isn't the right container to learn Docker with, but once you have the fundamentals down spinning up Lemmy was pretty seamless.