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

  • @SonyJunkieEnglish
    1•1 year ago

    Hi @[email protected]

    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.

    • ubergeek77OPEnglish
      2•1 year ago

      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!

      • @SonyJunkieEnglish
        1•1 year ago

        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

        • ubergeek77OPEnglish
          1•1 year ago

          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.

          • @SonyJunkieEnglish
            1•1 year ago

            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.