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

  • Horselover FatEnglish
    1•1 year ago

    Is this easier than the Ansible deployment? That was very straight forward if you’re running a system with apt.

    • ubergeek77OPEnglish
      3•1 year ago

      I am biased, but I would say yes, it is. There is only one config file to manage in my project, whereas the Ansible config has three separate config files the user needs to copy and edit.

      You also need* a different system with Ansible installed to actually run the playbook, since Ansible needs to connect to your server to run it. That is an extra installation step, on top of needing some way to ensure Ansible has the right SSH credentials to connect.

      *you can tell Ansible to connect to localhost, but this is not supported and a beginner wouldn’t know to do this.

      There is nothing wrong with the playbook though! I just thought beginners might be a bit intimidated by it, and the dependency on apt is a bit of a bummer.

      • Horselover FatEnglish
        3•1 year ago

        thanks, it looks good. The biggest plus it that it doesn’t rely on a Debian based system.