I have tried the docker, ansible, and scratch methods. I have been troubleshooting for a month now. I have gotten nowhere. I need someone to help walk me through how to deploy a lemmy server because the guides are absolute trash.

Please help. I’m wasting money running this VPS and for literally nothing.

Edit: So, I’ve tried the ansible method, but I can’t access my server this way. It just keeps saying “UNREACHABLE”. I have generated a dozen keys, none of them work. I have NO PROBLEMS with ssh in Putty. I can use Putty all day. Putty works fine using my ssh key. Ansible does not. No amount of new keys has made any difference. I have countless keys in my stupid droplet because of this hacky garbage.

  • @ZMonsterOPEnglish
    1•1 year ago

    Yes, it worked, but as I’ve told others, the dev did not make it for a production use case. They said they intended it to be used by “people in college that are just testing”. Several features don’t work and are not going to be supported, like SMTP, which I will require. They also said they didn’t intend to have more than one user of the instance… No idea who this usecase is for…

    • Max-PEnglish
      2•1 year ago

      Lots of people actually. Part of self-hosting is to be in control of your own stuff. My instance is for exclusive use of myself and my friends for example. That way if lemmy.ml or lemmy.world have problems, mine keeps working and will eventually resync when those come back online. I also have my own emails and my own Matrix and my own IRC bouncer and my own lots of things. That way I’m in full control of my experience, and I own all my data.

      There’s a fair bit of single user lemmy instances out there. It’s a valid use case, just not yours.

      • @ZMonsterOPEnglish
        1•1 year ago

        Oh okay, that makes sense. Thanks for the perspective!

    • hitagiEnglish
      2•1 year ago

      The usecase is for people who want a single-user/small instance or those who are completely new to selfhosting. I’m pretty sure SMTP works if you configure an external one (like Mailgun or SendGrid) which is what most people do (including me) since the SMTP config is done via lemmy.hjson (or in the case of Lemmy-Easy-Deploy, the config.env file). IMO, the only thing that makes Lemmy-Easy-Deploy worse for production use is Caddy which performs worse than nginx in some benchmarks. But I don’t think it’s that bad.

      But if you don’t want to use Lemmy-Easy-Deploy, then here’s my own documentation on how I installed Lemmy on my server. It’s different from the standard Lemmy docker or ansible install where I use nginx natively instead of containerized as this fixes my certbot issues. I’m not an expert on any of this but this is how I got it running.

      • @ZMonsterOPEnglish
        1•1 year ago

        Thanks for the link. I tried it out and had a problem with the “lemmy.hjson” file. It doesn’t look like I would expect, there is a bunch of non-sense. I did the wget command again and checked “config.hjson” and it is identical. So I think there is something wrong with that file.

        • hitagiEnglish
          1•1 year ago

          Whoops. Sorry about that. I used the wrong link. I fixed it and it should pull the correct config.hjson file now. Feel free to try again if you wish.