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

  • @[email protected]English
    1•1 year ago

    Wait, so pardon my noobism, but does this mean you need to federate with communities manually? Don’t instances start out as already being federated with everything?

    • ubergeek77OPEnglish
      3•1 year ago

      Yep. It’s all manual. There are hundreds of Lemmy instances out there, new instances have no way of discovering any of them unless you tell it how.

      Federation with a community only has to happen once. After it’s connected, the instance will always receive new data and posts from that point forward. That is why the major public instances always have posts from a wide variety of instances.

      But, only a single person needs to do the federation, it doesn’t have to be done by an admin. After the connection is made with a community, content from that community will start showing up on “All” for that instance for everyone.

      • @[email protected]English
        1•1 year ago

        Oh, okay, fair. So this means that the search for new communities to browse/federate with is less troublesome, the more users populate an instance. On the flip side, if I’m considering self-hosting as one single user, I should anticipate:

        • having a fairly long phase of community discovery, unless I already know which communities I’m interested in;
        • that those communities that I do federate with will not give me any data prior to the moment I federated with them (is there a cache system to avoid this? can I go specifically retrieve older posts?)
        • an important need for storage space, as I essentially become a duplicate of the server for every community I federated with, from that point on.

        Is this correct?

        • ubergeek77OPEnglish
          1•1 year ago
          • Not too long, but for the time being it will be fairly manual, yes. I haven’t used them, so I don’t have any links bookmarked for you, but I’ve seen at least one browser extension someone made to make this easier, by putting a “subscribe to my instance” button on instances you don’t own. And sites like this one make it easy to find new communities: https://lemmyverse.net/communities
          • The initial federation fetches the latest 20 posts in that community. You will not see anything older than that. However, if you copy the full direct link to a post or comment, and search for it in your instance’s URL bar, your instance will grab a copy of it, and you can click on the search result to interact with whatever you searched for.
          • Correct. I don’t know what long term storage looks like, I’ve had my instance for less than 3 weeks. But I can tell you I’m going through about 700MB per day. I am hoping someone smarter than me comes up with a guide to prune the database of old data. In the meantime, I can manually delete my thumbnail cache on the pictrs service to buy myself a little more time, but eventually I’ll have to either drop old posts or migrate to a larger storage volume. If you want a SUPER long term Lemmy instance, the more storage the better.