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!
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.
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
The check
will give a false positive if (for whatever reason) the domain name starts with httpThanks! Fix pushed.
Will try this tomorrow. Tried them all. Nothing seems to work! I have been at it the whole week trying.
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.
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.
I used this and the developer is very helpful. Works great. Helped me even upgrade to 0.18.0.
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!!
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!
Works great on Linode!!
Wow, I’ll definitely look into this, thanks! Even if I don’t use it, it still may be useful just reading through it.
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!
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.
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.
