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

  • @ChaosAD
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    2
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    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 :(

    • ubergeek77OP
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      21 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!

      • @ChaosAD
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        21 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?

        • ubergeek77OP
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          11 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

          • @ChaosAD
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            11 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.