Alexandrite UI: https://a.lemmy.world

Antik 👾@lemmy.world to Lemmy.World Announcements@lemmy.world – 1069 points –
a.lemmy.world

We just added Alexandrite to the server, it's an alternative desktop UI for Lemmy created by Sheodox who worked tirelessly to make the necessary changes to we could host it ourselves here. So go to https://a.lemmy.world and have a look!

He continues to update it constantly, you can follow the development on his github page or in his community. If you like what you see and want to support him, why not buy him a coffee? :)

For those who don't have Lemmy World as their home instance and want to use Alexandrite, either ask your instance admins to add it or go to https://alexandrite.app!

Edit: I should probably have mentioned that Alexandrite is meant for desktop!

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It's really great that you are moving so quickly and supporting your community in this way, but I wonder if all these front ends are potentially going to create a bit of a long term maintenance headache? How are we certain that they don't introduce any new vulnerabilities and how are we staying on top of those when they happen? I worry that each new frontend adds burden to an already small community for a potentially minor practical gain.

Don't get me wrong, you guys are doing awesome stuff, and I'm consistently impressed with this instance. That's just the first thing that comes to my head having done software for many years myself.

Maintenance in regards to updates is not an issue. All the extra frontends we added run in docker and are automatically updated twice a day to make sure we are always running the latest stable versions. All apps are using the Lemmy api's just like the 3rd party apps and should anything break we have ways to contact the developers.

How did you set them up to automatically update? Have you done a write up on how you set these up? Would be great for other admins to be able to do the same

We use docker compose in scripts and crontabs

/scripts/update-alexandrite.sh:

cd /opt/alexandrite
docker-compose pull
docker-compose down
docker-compose up -d

Then use crontab -e and add this line:

00 05,00 * * * bash /scripts/update-alexandrite.sh

Are you concerned at all with auto updating containers that some updates can break stuff?

I’ve had issues with watchtower and auto updating containers in the past breaking config files and stopping containers.

Changing the update rate in cron can help offset any broken / vulnerable updates that get pushed.

Sweet thanks, do you have this and scripts to keep the other front ends updated on GitHub somewhere?

It's just docker compose and crontab..

I understand but a lot of admins that are hosting instances just for themselves and a couple of friends have little no experience running a server so having a github with different tips and best practices would be very useful. I hope you consider it :)