Wanted to cross post this here in case someone has had this issue before. Been dealing with this for a couple of days now.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/94985

I set up my own personal Lemmy instance yesterday and everything seems to be up and running. I installed it on Docker with SSL enabled on a Digital Ocean droplet.

The only thing that doesn’t seem to work is federated search. I can search local communities, but no matter what I do I can’t get it to recognize other instances. I’ve tried:

And nothing shows up. I’ve tried the same search terms multiple times over the past day or so and nothing is changing. My instance has federation and federation debugging enabled (although I can’t figure out where the federation debugging outputs yet, because nothing in console log changes), and as far as I can tell there are no errors in the Docker logs that could point me in a specific direction. Where can I start looking to properly debug this?

EDIT: I needed to expose my lemmy backend to the proxy network. This answer here helped me get to the solution. Thanks so much! https://lemmy.world/comment/150173

  • @[email protected]English
    3•2 years ago

    Check sudo docker logs lemmy_lemmy_1 right after you search. I was getting http get request failures to the other servers.

    Add ‘lemmyexternalproxy’ to networks for the lemmy service in docker-compose.yml and rebuild ‘sudo docker-compose up -d --build’

    Fixed it for me.

    Edit: just read the part about nothing in the logs. If this is not it, I’m not sure.

    • @penguin_ex_machinaOPEnglish
      3•2 years ago

      I’m almost positive that network is already there but I’m definitely going to check the Lemmy-specific logs. I only knew how to check the general server logs when I last looked at it. If I ever get my kid to bed I’ll take another look.

      • @[email protected]English
        2•2 years ago

        Might be, the current docker-compose.yml has it in there properly. However, when I used the install with docker guide a day or two ago it hard linked to the 0.17 version which didn’t give external network access to the lemmy service. Sounded similar to the problem I was facing, but if you used the current docker-compose.yml I guess that is not it.

        It sounds like the back end has no external network access. You can check with something like sudo docker exec -it lemmy_lemmy_1 ping archlinux.org

        • @penguin_ex_machinaOPEnglish
          3•2 years ago

          !!! THAT DID IT.

          Thank you so much I would have never gotten to that solution on my own. Works beautifully now.

          • @[email protected]English
            1•2 years ago

            Awesome! No problems, I’m glad I could help. Took me a bit to figure out what was going on too.