Having trouble deploying Lemmy? Try my new script! Get up and running in minutes!

ubergeek77@lemmy.ubergeek77.chat to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 193 points –
github.com

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

121

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 ![image](link)

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!!

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!

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.

1 more...

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!

I will definitely try this out. I already have my domain and SSL certificate. This will work on linode right?

It will work on pretty much anything that has a public IP and a domain pointing to that IP. The only thing that won't work "out of the box" for most users is email, as most VPS providers block port 25. If you've requested access to port 25 and have been approved to use it, you can edit config.env to turn on the email service.

As for your SSL certificate, unfortunately this does not support importing your own certificate. It's made for beginners, after all :p

But there should be no problems with Caddy simply requesting a new one for you!

I think I have successfully got the server running on my linode.

I'm glad to hear that! Thanks for letting me know, it's nice to hear people were able to use my script to get up and running :)

Email is vital to lemmy working. Saying this works without mail config is just silly.

I'm not sure what you mean? Most people are just self hosting instances for themselves, where email isn't needed. My instance doesn't have an email service.

And as I explained, if email is something you want, I have an advanced option for this. It's not the default because there is not a public VPS host out there that lets you use port 25 without special approval.

Email config is needed for lost passwords. It's also needed for account verification, if you run without verification you could easily become a place for people to abuse other servers and get yourself defederated.

Many web hosts have poisoned mail IPs, so setting up with a smtp config to a well known site server is required if you want your emails to be delivered.

And that is why I don't advertise this as supporting email out of the box, and why it's an advanced option without any support from me. The embedded postfix server is part of the official Docker Compose deployment from upstream Lemmy, and it's part of the officially supported Ansible deployment too. Those deployment methods are what this is modeled after. That is as far as I go on email support. If upstream Lemmy started including some automatic AWS SNS configuration, I would adopt it, but they have not done so.

Everyone who has reported success to me so far are running single user instances for themselves. That is my target audience, and for that audience (and myself), email is not even close to being a hard requirement.

However, if you would like to improve this script by adding support for more robust and secure email systems, I would be happy if you submitted a PR to do just that :)

Don't lose your passwords and leave closed registration so only people you actually want on your instance are on it. You absolutely do not need email.

You can't have the checkbox for federation and private, the server will crash and tell you that in the lemmy log. Had that happen when I did thy to setup without email the first time.

Private and federation are mutually exclusive concepts. Private instances are ones that intentionally don’t federate - like a private company community that’s locked to their intranet. For self hosted Lemmy instances you just need to close registration. Then since no one can apply, the only use case for email becomes the Forgot Password button for if you forget your password and at that point you’re better served with a password manager.

"Private instance" and "disable registration" are not the same thing. There are separate options for both. It is possible to run a federated single-user instance with registrations disabled. That's how I run mine.

Weird. I used this script with no working email. How's it going from my private instance that is federated?

how well do those email servers work to begin with? i just flat out disabled the postfix relay on my instance and simply configured sendgrid, which works perfectly, no delays or spam folder issues (although i did have to disable a bunch of tracking bullshit). doing so with similar services has been my go-to card in freelance webdev, because getting other mail servers to trust you can be hard, so i'm interested in the experience people are having with those. (i'd much prefer to self-host email too, but providing a good experience is the primary goal)

I haven't actually used the embedded postfix server at all, I keep mine disabled. I only include it because it's "included" in the official Docker deployment files, and I try to keep this deployment as close to that as possible.

I'm considering adding support for an external email service, as you mentioned, but I have nearly zero experience in using managed email services, and I'm not sure if non-technical users would be able to navigate the configuration of things I can't do for them (i.e. on a web dashboard somewhere). And if I can't do it for them, it means more issues for me, so I hesitate to add support for it at all.

I'd love to hear your experience in setting up sendgrid and how easy that was. And the tracking stuff you mentioned as well.

On the surface, setting up an external mail server is actually super easy. Pretty much every service supports SMTP, so all you need is to find your credentials (an endpoint, a username, and a password) and input that in your lemmy.hjson file, along with a sender address. There is a verification process with every email provider, you will usually have to set some DNS records to prove you own the domain you're trying to send from, but once you do these two things, emails will just start flying out.

The actual process tends to be a little more tedious though. Pretty much every mail provider wants to sell you on their specific super awesome API and only mentions SMTP as a footnote, for reasons that I can only parse as an attempted vendor lock-in. They also sometimes make the verification process difficult. SendGrid, for example, immediately redirects you to their "sender identities" which are more useful for their marketing automation tooling than they are for automated emails from a website, and you also have to dig a fair bit to find the SMTP credentials. (The endpoint is smtp.sendgrid.net, apikey on the username, and whatever your API key is for the password, you'll need to set one of those up.) They also have a number of different tracking things that you'll have to find and turn off in the UI (luckily all of them can be toggled in the same place), which would normally actually help you by providing you statistics about how many emails were opened and how many people clicked on links, but for the emails Lemmy sends, it's useless and I didn't want SendGrid to collect that data on my instance users, so I shut that off.

Initially, I wanted to use Amazon SES, but they have an even more tedious setup: you have to talk to an actual human to have them turn it on for you, otherwise you're stuck in sandbox mode and can only send email to verified receiver addresses. Their service works well though, I used it a lot in my freelancer days, and they do make it fairly straightforward to find the SMTP credentials, but the verification process can be slow.

I also remember using Mailgun for some project ages ago, it was pretty much the same deal as all the others: you have to pry the SMTP details out of their docs, but once you do and you verify your stuff, it works well.

Ultimately, I think the best you could do to help out users here is to provide them with documentation for a few of these services: exactly where to go, which buttons to click and whatnot. Or just stick to the embedded service for a bit, but the real issue there is the bounce rates from spammers. They made my instance send out like 60-70 verification emails for bogus addresses on gmail, yahoo, hotmail, and live.com on the first day I got federation working, and if you don't already have a good reputation -- which is what these third parties help you with -- then you can easily get yourself blacklisted, either internally or externally.

I see. Thanks a lot for this!

I really don't have the capacity to support a bunch of different email services, so it sounds like the best I can do right now is make the SMTP settings accessible without also running the postfix server. So if someone wants to run their own email somewhere else, they can configure it. But otherwise, I'll leave it to the user to figure out what happens after an email request leaves Lemmy.

Does that sound fair, and like something you would have used? Essentially just an interface in config.env that puts the right SMTP address/credentials in lemmy.hjson.

yup, that sounds perfect

i can't track down a non vendor-specific guide right now but if you just expose the same settings in config.env that you'd have in the lemmy.hjson file that should be more than sufficient to get an external service going

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.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.

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?

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.

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

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

Will try this tomorrow. Tried them all. Nothing seems to work! I have been at it the whole week trying.

This was the only tool that I was able to get running. I recommend it to anyone curious about running their own instance. I tried both the official Ansible and Docker instructions, and neither worked.

I used this and the developer is very helpful. Works great. Helped me even upgrade to 0.18.0.

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.

This was absolutely amazing. I was having some trouble with the build process using the docker compose from Lemmy itself, but this just instantly worked. Thank you!

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

Looks really good. I did it pretty much the same way, myself - but if I were looking to start again, I would definitely use this.

Edit: Ran it on a fresh AWS Ubuntu instance and it worked perfectly fine.

Were you able to get AWS to open port 25 for smtp support?

I didn't bother, as I was just testing. But you are right, port 25 outbound is blocked by default. They have a defined process for you to ask for it to be unblocked and you have to tell them what you are using it for and how you are preventing spam from being sent. In this case it might be enough to say that you aren't allowing port 25 inbound, so it can't be used as an open relay.

Yeah, I tried and failed. They denied it and told me to use SES lol.

Whatever haha

I am not 100% surprised they refuse to do it for new accounts. If you have an account that has been with them for a while, they most likely would open it.

Problem with SES is that you start sandboxed and can only deliver to specific email addresses - which obviously won't work here.

Yeah maybe, i've had my account for a few years but who knows.

If i decide do use email i'll just make an smtp mail server on my homelab

After trying to do it with docker or ansible manually for hours and failing, this was soo helpful. So thank you.

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.

Is this easier than the Ansible deployment? That was very straight forward if you’re running a system with apt.

I am biased, but I would say yes, it is. There is only one config file to manage in my project, whereas the Ansible config has three separate config files the user needs to copy and edit.

You also need* a different system with Ansible installed to actually run the playbook, since Ansible needs to connect to your server to run it. That is an extra installation step, on top of needing some way to ensure Ansible has the right SSH credentials to connect.

*you can tell Ansible to connect to localhost, but this is not supported and a beginner wouldn't know to do this.

There is nothing wrong with the playbook though! I just thought beginners might be a bit intimidated by it, and the dependency on apt is a bit of a bummer.

thanks, it looks good. The biggest plus it that it doesn’t rely on a Debian based system.

A bit OT, but worth the shot: can anyone confirm whether instances deployed with this script can be found on Mastodon?

I have tried both the ansible script provided by the developers and I've adapted the docker-compose files to get things running on Docker Swarm. Everything seems to be working well, object storage, federation... except that I can not find any user or community from my instance if I search from Mastodon.

I saw a bug

I see this user who deployed using this script, I click the username link below his name which should lead to server.tld/u/username, but it leads to server.tld/users/username, maybe some kind of dbUser -> outside world configuration is broken?

Also the Bio is different on his local instance and the federated instance?

What adjustments I need to do to run this locally (in my LAN) just for testing?

I haven't tested a local only use case, but you can probably set these options in config.env

  • Set LEMMY_HOSTNAME to localhost
  • Set CADDY_DISABLE_TLS to true
  • Set TLS_ENABLED to false

This will disable any HTTPS certificate generation and only run Lemmy on port 80. I don't know if Caddy or Lemmy will act weird if the hostname is localhost, but this should work for you. Let me know if it doesn't.

Sorry to bring more problems to you.

SOLVED: The problem was caused because I was using a | In the site name SETUP_SITE_NAME

for some reason the bash script is returning sed: -e expression #7, char 32: unknown option to `s' I 've looked online and found nothing that related to my problem. I suspect the problem starts in line 253 because the file lemmy.hjson is empty and the docker-compose.yml isn't created.

Good catch!

I will make a note in the example file about this. You can use special characters if you want, but you'll need to backslash escape them first. So in config.env, you probably could have done:

SETUP_SITE_NAME="Lemmy \| Server"

hi! do you have some IM we could talk please? I am getting insane haha, trying to bring up a server for 4 days now lol I think your method is the closest to work but I am getting something wrong.

Sorry, I don't use Matrix. Please describe your issue here and I will try my best to assist.

OK! So here we go.

I already use Caddy on my server because of other services I have running so I was afraid it could conflict with the caddy container in the docker-compose you provide, so I disabled caddy service just for testing and afterwards I could try to figure how to make it work alongside my current configuration. But for some reason I can't get my domain to connect to the instance.

So I decided to try different and do not install the caddy container and use the one I have running natively. So I just coppied the Caddyfile content that is generated by the deploy.sh and replaced the env variable with my domain name (just to make sure it would work).

I changed the docker-compose.yml to this:

version: "3.9"
x-logging:
  &default-logging
  options:
    max-size: '500m'
  driver: json-file

services:

  lemmy:
    image: dessalines/lemmy:0.17.4
    environment:
      - RUST_LOG="warn,lemmy_server=info,lemmy_api=info,lemmy_api_common=info,lemmy_api_crud=info,lemmy_apub=info,lemmy_db_schema=info,lemmy_db_views=info,lemmy_db_views_actor=info,lemmy_db_views_moderator=info,lemmy_routes=info,lemmy_utils=info,lemmy_websocket=info"
    volumes:
      - ./lemmy.hjson:/config/config.hjson
    depends_on:
      - postgres
      - pictrs
    networks:
      - lemmyinternal
      - lemmybridge
    ports:
      - 8536:8536
    restart: always
    logging: *default-logging

  lemmy-ui:
    image: dessalines/lemmy-ui:0.17.4
    environment:
      - LEMMY_UI_LEMMY_INTERNAL_HOST=lemmy:8536
      - LEMMY_UI_LEMMY_EXTERNAL_HOST=localhost:1236
      - LEMMY_HTTPS=true
    depends_on:
      - lemmy
    networks:
      - lemmyinternal
    ports:
    #Always keep em guessing
      - 1236:1234
    restart: always
    logging: *default-logging

  pictrs:
    image: asonix/pictrs:0.3.1
    user: 991:991
    env_file:
      - ./pictrs.env
    volumes:
      - pictrs_data:/mnt
    networks:
      - lemmyinternal
      - lemmybridge
    restart: always
    logging: *default-logging

  postgres:
    image: postgres:15-alpine
    environment:
      - POSTGRES_USER=lemmy
      - POSTGRES_DB=lemmy
    env_file:
      - ./postgres.env
    volumes:
      - postgres_data:/var/lib/postgresql/data
    networks:
      - lemmyinternal
    ports:
      - 5432:5432
    restart: always
    logging: *default-logging

networks:
  lemmyexternalproxy:
  lemmybridge:
  lemmyinternal:
    driver: bridge
    internal: true

Placed all the .env in the same folder of the docker-compose.yml and placed the lemmy.hjson in this same folder too.

{
  setup: {
    admin_username: "lemmy"
    admin_password: "sjhdakjhsdjhasdkjashdjkahs"
    site_name: "Lemmy"
  }

  hostname: "lemmy.domain"
  bind: "0.0.0.0"
  port: 8536
  tls_enabled: true

  pictrs: {
    url: "http://pictrs:8080/"
    api_key: "dkslahlsdjhasjdçlajsçdaskj"
  }

  database: {
    user: "lemmy"
    password: "jahdskjhadjsappdsiadopisap"
    host: "postgres"
    port: 5432
    database: "lemmy"
    pool_size: 5
  }

}

runned the docker-compose up -d and everything went OK, no errors in the terminal. but still my domain don't connect.

I have disabled cloudflare proxy and cache but nothing helped :(

Sorry, combining this with an already-running webserver is not a use case I support for this easy deployment script. My script is intended for new deployments for people not already running servers.

The best thing you can do is change the ports in docker-compose.yml.template, and today I will make an update that gives you environment variables for them.

Unfortunately I do not have time to help you dig deeper into the issue, but hopefully these tips help you:

  • Change the ports in docker-compose.yml.template to something that won't conflict with your webserver. Take note of what port you used for 80
  • Edit config.env and set CADDY_DISABLE_TLS to true
  • Edit your own webserver config to point to this deployment via a reverse proxy. I'll leave it up to you to configure that. You are already using Caddy, so you can look at my Caddyfile for inspiration on how reverse proxies work.

Since you're using your own webserver, doing it this way will not automatically retrieve certificates for you. Hopefully you have a system in place for that already.

Good luck!

Just one more if you don't mind, please.

Here should not be displaying the ports for lemmy-ui and lemmy-postgres too?

If you are bypassing my Caddy service, you will need to expose lemmy-ui as well. Look at my Caddyfile to see how things are supposed to be routed. Don't forget the @-prefixed handles. Those are important.

Unfortunately, if you have a specific use case involving a webserver, Lemmy Easy Deploy may not be for you. However, you can also take a look at Lemmy's own Docker files:

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/tree/0.17.4/docker/prod

You are helping the whole community! Thank you, I will give a try to it, since I'm quite new in self-hosted platform!

Any tips on how to customize the favicon for my instance? Using the docker-compose method.

Looks like my favicon populated when I uploaded an icon in the admin panel: yourlemmydomain/admin

*edit seems that I replied to a comment showing as new for me but was actually old.

Marius Hosting published a good guide this week that I used on my nas without an issue (via docker compose).

Threw an error:

Creating lemmy-easy-deploy_pictrs_1 ... Creating lemmy-easy-deploy_postgres_1 ... error

ERROR: for lemmy-easy-deploy_postgres_1 Cannot start service postgres: failed to create task for container: failed to create shim task: OCI runtime create failed: runc cr Creating lemmy-easy-deploy_pictrs_1 ... error: permission denied: unknown

Does your user have permission to use Docker? You could try running the script as root and seeing if that helps?

Is there any other info about your system that you can provide? For example, are you using a non-standard OCI runtime, such as podman? I've added detection for podman-compose in the script, but I haven't tested it yet. If you're using something like that, you'll need to ensure all the permissions are set up correctly.

Shouldn't be anything odd, I had used the ansible script but had run the install from that.

From a quick Google search, it looks like there may have been a bug in the Docker engine a few months ago that might cause this. If possible, please update your Docker engine.

If the issue still occurs, unfortunately this is a core Docker engine/Docker Compose issue, and outside of my ability to fix :(

Re-installed docker-compose for different source and still not working

Docker Compose is just a frontend script for Docker, it doesn't provide the engine. Is it possible you don't have Docker itself installed? I will add an additional check to my script to guide users into making sure Docker is installed.

Regardless of if you have Docker installed or not, if you are on Ubuntu, the Ubuntu version of Docker is usually several versions out of date. I recommend following this guide to help you uninstall everything Docker related from your system, then reinstalling the most stable and up to date version of Docker.

https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/ubuntu/

After doing this, reboot your server, then try again. Make sure you can run:

docker run hello-world

If that errors too, then unfortunately there is not a lot I can do to help you. But hopefully reinstalling from the official Docker sources works for you.

If you aren't on Ubuntu, you can get specific instructions for different distributions directly on this page:

https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/

For the guide you're following, you should be sure to follow the "Uninstall old versions" part, then proceed with the rest of the commands on the page.

EDIT: I've updated the script to add some additional checks and messages that may help avoid this for future users!

Way cool. Can you provide something for unRaid?

Sorry, I don't have access to an unRaid system to test it with.

However, I know most NAS systems at least support CLI-style Docker and Docker Compose, so if you can manage to get Docker running, it might work? The script has some Docker detection if you're not sure.

However, I know Synology hogs use of port 80 and 443. I'm not sure if unRaid is the same way. If it is, this might not be the best solution for you. But, if you want to give it a shot, I do have some advanced options in my config that lets you change to different ports and turn off HTTPS (so you can run a proxy in front of it). I can't really help people who run it behind a webserver like this, but the template files in my repo can be freely modified, so you're welcome to hack at my script any way you like to get it working!

Hey @ubergeek77@lemmy.ubergeek77.chat, I'm trying this on an Aarm64 instance and the script says it only works on v0.17.4. Is there a plan to update to 0.18?

EDIT: the script fails for 0.17.4 here:

=> ERROR [lemmy builder 6/7] RUN cargo build --release 1183.5s

Build timer continues but CPU usage drops off. Any ideas where I've gone wrong?

Before this week, I would have told you no. But I have big plans for the 0.18.1 update.

The Lemmy team has completely broken ARM support with seemingly no plan to support it again. They switched to a base Docker image that only supports x86_64. This is why your build fails. I still don't understand why they would move from a multiarch image to an x86_64-only one.

I've been working on this for about a week, and just yesterday I finished a GitHub Actions pipeline that builds multiarch images for x64/arm/arm64. I currently have successful builds for 0.18.1-rc.2. In a future update for my script, I will have it use these, that way ARM users don't need to compile it anymore. I just ask for a little patience, I haven't been able to do any work on Lemmy Easy Deploy since I've been working on this pipeline :)

I also do want to qualify - don't get your hopes up until you see it running for yourself. Ultimately, I am just a DevOps guy, not a Lemmy maintainer. I haven't tested my ARM images yet, and while I did my best to get these to build properly, I can't fix everything. If anything else breaks due to running on ARM, it will be up to the Lemmy team to fix those issues (which is not likely anytime soon, if their updated x86_64 Dockerfiles are any indication).

But, fingers crossed everything goes smoothly! Keep an eye out for an update, I'm working hard on it, hopefully I can get it out in time for 0.18.1!

EDIT:

Of course I had to just go and open my mouth. This doesn't look good. I may need to remove ARM support from Lemmy Easy Deploy entirely until Lemmy figures this out :/

Try again with the latest version of Lemmy Easy Deploy.

I am now building multiarch images for 0.18.x, and my script will now default to my multiarch images, so there is no longer a need to build it yourself :)

So stupid question - how do you shut them down? Docker compose down or stop don't seem to work.

Also, as an intermediate (spoiled Unraid) user, if I'm behind nginx proxy manager with custom ports do I just change 80 and 443 in the lemmy docker-compose? I'm doing this in a Debian VM.

I'll add some better instructions for this to the readme.

You can do any Docker compose commands by changing to the ./live folder, then running:

docker compose -p lemmy-easy-deploy <command>

<command> can be whatever Docker Compose supports, up,down,ps, etc.

I don't have config options for the ports, but you can just change them in docker-compose.yml.template to change what they're listening on. As long as yourdomain.com:80 is reachable from the public, it shouldn't matter what routing shenanigans are going on behind it.

Hi @ubergeek77@lemmy.ubergeek77.chat

I must be doing something wrong here because unlike many others I can't seem to get this working! Please can you offer some advice?

I have amended the config.env file to change the HOSTNAME, SITE NAME and ADMIN USER but left everything else the same.

I then ran ./deploy.sh and everything seems to have worked because it presented me with the admin login credentials and basic instructions to shutdown and start the instance. I tried simply typing the IP address of the docker container in to a browser but that didn't work and TBH I didn't expect it to. I then typed the URL into the browser and I'm getting a "ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS" error message. I read through the trouble shooting on your Github but the only reference to too many redirects mentions a Cloudflare API token, I'm not using Cloudflare nut I am using nginx proxy manager to point my URL to the docker container.

I hope some of this makes sense.

Hey there, please note that running behind a reverse proxy is not supported. You can do it if you want, but you are kinda on your own, sorry.

If it helps, you will probably need to disable Caddy's TLS in the config, and you will need to make sure that the request reaches Caddy via the correct host. You can't reverse proxy directly to port 80 over an IP, it needs to think it's coming from an actual domain.

You can also check out my advanced configuration page to learn how to override the Caddyfile template and roll your own config that is more compatible for your use case.

Good luck!

Thank you so much for replying.

I think this is above my skill level, but I will have a read through your advanced configuration page and see if I can understand it.

Thanks again, but I think I'm going to need more than luck!! LOL

You're welcome!

If you're not already, I recommend trying to host this on a cloud VPS service, such as Vultr, Linode, or DigitalOcean. This would give you a reliable, always online Lemmy instance, which means you won't miss any federation data. Even a cheap $5 VPS instance would be enough to get you started, though a $10 would give you more breathing room.

If you're hosting at home, it's generally not a good idea to do that, especially for an application like Lemmy. Most consumer grade network equipment at home might not be equipped to deal with the unrelenting 24/7 flood of data coming in due to federation. And if your power or internet ever goes out, you will be missing any comments, posts, or votes that were sent out during your downtime.

Thank you again. Yeah, I'm trying this from home as opposed to a vps. It's more as a learning exercise than a serious instance.

I'm still going to try and getting it working behind my reverse proxy, like I say, as a learning experience.

Exploring Go High Level:

  1. What’s the Enthusiasm About?
    Hello there! Are you familiar with Go High Level? If not, let's break it down. Imagine managing multiple apps for marketing. Sounds busy. That's where Go High Level comes in. It's like that friend who has a solution for everything. Whether you are working on creating an outstanding sales funnel or sending out an email campaign, this platform has your back. The best part? They let you test drive everything with a 14-day free trial. It's like trying out a new car but for your business. And if you ever need assistance, their support team is just a click away. Pretty exciting, huh?

  2. So, How Much Does It Cost?
    Alright, let's talk about the financial side. Go High Level offers 3 main plans. The Agency Starter Plan is perfect if you're just starting or have a small business. It's loaded with all the essential tools, and it's quite cost-effective. But if you're looking to scale up, the Agency Unlimited Plan is your best choice. It's like the VIP pass at a concert, giving you access to everything without any limitations. Not sure about committing? Remember that 14-day free trial I mentioned? It's a great way to give it a try without any obligations. Lastly, they offer a Pro plan that includes "SaaS mode," where you can white label the product under your brand. Fantastic!

  3. Why Everyone's Raving About It:
    In a world full of sophisticated digital tools, Go High Level is like that all-in-one Swiss Army knife. There's no need to switch between apps because it has everything under one roof. Whether you're a newcomer or an experienced marketer, it's super user-friendly. It's not just about launching impressive campaigns; they ensure you understand their performance with top-notch analytics. There's even a white-label feature for marketing agencies, so you can add your brand and impress your clients.

Here is a link to their 14-day free trial:
https://www.gohighlevel.com/?fp\_ref=get-started-now.

Exploring Go High Level:

What’s the Enthusiasm About?
Hello there! Are you familiar with Go High Level? If not, let's break it down. Imagine managing multiple apps for marketing. Sounds busy. That's where Go High Level comes in. It's like that friend who has a solution for everything. Whether you are working on creating an outstanding sales funnel or sending out an email campaign, this platform has your back. The best part? They let you test drive everything with a 14-day free trial. It's like trying out a new car but for your business. And if you ever need assistance, their support team is just a click away. Pretty exciting, huh?

So, How Much Does It Cost?
Alright, let's talk about the financial side. Go High Level offers 3 main plans. The Agency Starter Plan is perfect if you're just starting or have a small business. It's loaded with all the essential tools, and it's quite cost-effective. But if you're looking to scale up, the Agency Unlimited Plan is your best choice. It's like the VIP pass at a concert, giving you access to everything without any limitations. Not sure about committing? Remember that 14-day free trial I mentioned? It's a great way to give it a try without any obligations. Lastly, they offer a Pro plan that includes "SaaS mode," where you can white label the product under your brand. Fantastic!

Why Everyone's Raving About It:
In a world full of sophisticated digital tools, Go High Level is like that all-in-one Swiss Army knife. There's no need to switch between apps because it has everything under one roof. Whether you're a newcomer or an experienced marketer, it's super user-friendly. It's not just about launching impressive campaigns; they ensure you understand their performance with top-notch analytics. There's even a white-label feature for marketing agencies, so you can add your brand and impress your clients.

Here is a link to their 14-day free trial:
https://www.gohighlevel.com/?fp\_ref=get-started-now.

I appreciate the effort, but for software as experimental as Lemmy I would argue making things 1-click "simple" will inevitably lead to people breaking their instances in the future, when some migration will be required.

I would strongly suggest people figure things on their own.