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

  • ubergeek77OPEnglish
    2•1 year ago

    Good catch!

    I will make a note in the example file about this. You can use special characters if you want, but you’ll need to backslash escape them first. So in config.env, you probably could have done:

    SETUP_SITE_NAME="Lemmy \| Server"
    • @ChaosADEnglish
      5•1 year ago

      hi! do you have some IM we could talk please? I am getting insane haha, trying to bring up a server for 4 days now lol I think your method is the closest to work but I am getting something wrong.

      • ubergeek77OPEnglish
        1•1 year ago

        Sorry, I don’t use Matrix. Please describe your issue here and I will try my best to assist.

        • @ChaosADEnglish
          2•1 year ago

          OK! So here we go.

          I already use Caddy on my server because of other services I have running so I was afraid it could conflict with the caddy container in the docker-compose you provide, so I disabled caddy service just for testing and afterwards I could try to figure how to make it work alongside my current configuration. But for some reason I can’t get my domain to connect to the instance.

          So I decided to try different and do not install the caddy container and use the one I have running natively. So I just coppied the Caddyfile content that is generated by the deploy.sh and replaced the env variable with my domain name (just to make sure it would work).

          I changed the docker-compose.yml to this:

          version: "3.9"
x-logging:
  &default-logging
  options:
    max-size: '500m'
  driver: json-file

services:

  lemmy:
    image: dessalines/lemmy:0.17.4
    environment:
      - RUST_LOG="warn,lemmy_server=info,lemmy_api=info,lemmy_api_common=info,lemmy_api_crud=info,lemmy_apub=info,lemmy_db_schema=info,lemmy_db_views=info,lemmy_db_views_actor=info,lemmy_db_views_moderator=info,lemmy_routes=info,lemmy_utils=info,lemmy_websocket=info"
    volumes:
      - ./lemmy.hjson:/config/config.hjson
    depends_on:
      - postgres
      - pictrs
    networks:
      - lemmyinternal
      - lemmybridge
    ports:
      - 8536:8536
    restart: always
    logging: *default-logging

  lemmy-ui:
    image: dessalines/lemmy-ui:0.17.4
    environment:
      - LEMMY_UI_LEMMY_INTERNAL_HOST=lemmy:8536
      - LEMMY_UI_LEMMY_EXTERNAL_HOST=localhost:1236
      - LEMMY_HTTPS=true
    depends_on:
      - lemmy
    networks:
      - lemmyinternal
    ports:
    #Always keep em guessing
      - 1236:1234
    restart: always
    logging: *default-logging

  pictrs:
    image: asonix/pictrs:0.3.1
    user: 991:991
    env_file:
      - ./pictrs.env
    volumes:
      - pictrs_data:/mnt
    networks:
      - lemmyinternal
      - lemmybridge
    restart: always
    logging: *default-logging

  postgres:
    image: postgres:15-alpine
    environment:
      - POSTGRES_USER=lemmy
      - POSTGRES_DB=lemmy
    env_file:
      - ./postgres.env
    volumes:
      - postgres_data:/var/lib/postgresql/data
    networks:
      - lemmyinternal
    ports:
      - 5432:5432
    restart: always
    logging: *default-logging

networks:
  lemmyexternalproxy:
  lemmybridge:
  lemmyinternal:
    driver: bridge
    internal: true

          Placed all the .env in the same folder of the docker-compose.yml and placed the lemmy.hjson in this same folder too.

          {
  setup: {
    admin_username: "lemmy"
    admin_password: "sjhdakjhsdjhasdkjashdjkahs"
    site_name: "Lemmy"
  }

  hostname: "lemmy.domain"
  bind: "0.0.0.0"
  port: 8536
  tls_enabled: true

  pictrs: {
    url: "http://pictrs:8080/"
    api_key: "dkslahlsdjhasjdçlajsçdaskj"
  }

  database: {
    user: "lemmy"
    password: "jahdskjhadjsappdsiadopisap"
    host: "postgres"
    port: 5432
    database: "lemmy"
    pool_size: 5
  }

}

          runned the docker-compose up -d and everything went OK, no errors in the terminal. but still my domain don’t connect.

          I have disabled cloudflare proxy and cache but nothing helped :(

          • ubergeek77OPEnglish
            2•1 year ago

            Sorry, combining this with an already-running webserver is not a use case I support for this easy deployment script. My script is intended for new deployments for people not already running servers.

            The best thing you can do is change the ports in docker-compose.yml.template, and today I will make an update that gives you environment variables for them.

            Unfortunately I do not have time to help you dig deeper into the issue, but hopefully these tips help you:

            • Change the ports in docker-compose.yml.template to something that won’t conflict with your webserver. Take note of what port you used for 80
            • Edit config.env and set CADDY_DISABLE_TLS to true
            • Edit your own webserver config to point to this deployment via a reverse proxy. I’ll leave it up to you to configure that. You are already using Caddy, so you can look at my Caddyfile for inspiration on how reverse proxies work.

            Since you’re using your own webserver, doing it this way will not automatically retrieve certificates for you. Hopefully you have a system in place for that already.

            Good luck!

            • @ChaosADEnglish
              2•1 year ago

              Just one more if you don’t mind, please.

              Here should not be displaying the ports for lemmy-ui and lemmy-postgres too?

              • ubergeek77OPEnglish
                1•1 year ago

                If you are bypassing my Caddy service, you will need to expose lemmy-ui as well. Look at my Caddyfile to see how things are supposed to be routed. Don’t forget the @-prefixed handles. Those are important.

                Unfortunately, if you have a specific use case involving a webserver, Lemmy Easy Deploy may not be for you. However, you can also take a look at Lemmy’s own Docker files:

                https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/tree/0.17.4/docker/prod

                • @ChaosADEnglish
                  1•1 year ago
                    lemmy-ui:
    image: dessalines/lemmy-ui:0.17.4
    environment:
      - LEMMY_UI_LEMMY_INTERNAL_HOST=lemmy:8536
      - LEMMY_UI_LEMMY_EXTERNAL_HOST=localhost:1236
      - LEMMY_HTTPS=true
    depends_on:
      - lemmy
    networks:
      - lemmyinternal
    ports:
      - 1236:1234
    restart: always
    logging: *default-logging

                  It is odd, I have added the port in the docker-compose.yml file.