Does anyone run their own Lemmy instance on a pi? How was the process of setting it up? Were there any pitfalls? How is performance?
[Edit] So a lot of testing around. Compiling from scratch, etc, etc…
So far i have tried
- installing lemmy using rootless docker (on 0.17.3)
- compiling the image 0.18 docker image as arm
rootless docker did not work well for me. lots of systemd issues and i gave up after running into a lot of issues. I tried rootless docker for security reasons. minimal permissions, etc.
When trying to compile the latest lemmy image in arm, i ran into issues with muslrust not having an arm version. It might be worth investigating rewriting the docker file from 0.17.3 to work with 0.18.0 but i haven’t investigated that fully yet! I tried compiling the latest image because i wanted to be able to use the latest features
At the moment, I’m trying to set lemmy to run under bare metal. Im currently attempting to compile lemmy under arm. If that works, i’ll start setting up .service files to start up lemmy and pictrs.
So in the official
docker-compose.yml
lines that define where/how to get the image for that application.For example:
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/c9e9ff46faa40e2642343effb117693bfa525c5f/docker/docker-compose.yml#L41-L43
build: context: ../ dockerfile: docker/Dockerfile
This tells docker to look for a file called
docker/Dockerfile
in the parent directory. This means that when you go to calldocker compose up -d
it will build an image from source using that Dockerfile. For the Pi we don’t want this (at least as of 0.17.x; I haven’t tested 0.18.0 yet).Instead we want to use a pre-built image. To do that we need to go to docker hub, specifically: https://hub.docker.com/r/dessalines/lemmy/tags and find the latest tag that matches the architecture of the system we’re building on. I assume you’re on a Pi4 running a 64bit so, so that gives us
0.17.3-linux-arm64
. After you’ve got that tag we just need to replace those 3 lines above with:image: dessalines/lemmy:0.17.3-linux-arm64
Now when we go to call
docker compose up -d
it will pull down that prebuilt image instead of building for source. Btw, you’ll want to do the same for thelemmy-ui
service.P.S. I don’t have much experience using Ansible, so I can’t help here. I normally just SSH directly into the Pi and do everything there.
Oh wait, I forgot, compose .yaml syntax is (almost) the same as Ansible, so no need for Ansible. Thanks for pointing to the docker images. I’ll start messing about with those. Still need to pick an fqdn for those instances. Do I want to use lemmy.my.domain or direct my.domain. (as it’s by all means mine anyway)