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!
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
Can you point to the post ? Didn’t found it
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.
What was difficult about ansible? The 4 step instructions worked perfectly for me.
I’m just a novice hobbyist (the only server I’ve put together was a homebridge server years ago) so the learning curve for this was relatively high putting together a VPS, setting up ssh, learning how to properly configure, and there were some errors when running the playbook I had to slowly figure out. Honestly though once it was all done, I thought “man, that was actually pretty easy” and I learned a lot so that was really cool
The check
$LEMMY_HOSTNAME == http*will give a false positive if (for whatever reason) the domain name starts with httpThanks! Fix pushed.
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!!
Will try this tomorrow. Tried them all. Nothing seems to work! I have been at it the whole week trying.
Works great on Linode!!
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.
I used this and the developer is very helpful. Works great. Helped me even upgrade to 0.18.0.
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.
After trying to do it with docker or ansible manually for hours and failing, this was soo helpful. So thank you.
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!Thanks!
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!
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.
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!
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!
