As someone who spent hours figuring out how to deploy through Ansible, how dare you ~/s~ But seriously thank you for putting in the work to make creating an instance more attainable for people.
Selfhosted
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
-
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
-
No spam posting.
-
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
-
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
-
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
-
No trolling.
Resources:
- awesome-selfhosted software
- awesome-sysadmin resources
- Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
What was difficult about ansible? The 4 step instructions worked perfectly for me.
Literally been thinking about this so thank you beautiful brained individual. Would you mind if I shouted this in the YSK group?
Thank you very much for the kind words!
Please be my guest! It would make me happy to know this was helping people join Lemmy!
Really awesome work. We need more Lemmy servers!
seriously, distributing the load helps a LOT. Though if you can't spin up your own instance one thing you can do is try and host pictures externally, in !youshouldknow[email protected] a post mentioned how to do it for images in comments since by default it has you upload if you don't manually put in ![image](link)
Been pounding my head against the desk for the last TWO DAYS trying to get everything to work. Then you came along and solved all of my problems and it only took me 10 minutes to set up (mostly due to waiting on DNS to flush!)
THANK YOU SO MUCH for creating this, and PLEASE continue to maintain! I will gib coffees if need be along the way!!
You kind Sir/Lady/Gentleperson are making the fediverse a better place with this help. Thanks a bunch, gonna definitely ease my attempts at eventually self-hosting!
I'm relatively competent installing server software, but the Lemmy instructions completely flummoxed me. Their docker instructions just don't work.
I ended up using the ansible docker scripts and filling out the blanks because I'm unfamiliar with ansible.
If this is as good as it sounds, you're doing everyone a massive favour.
The check $LEMMY_HOSTNAME == http*
will give a false positive if (for whatever reason) the domain name starts with http
Thanks! Fix pushed.
Looks great my dude.
If you expanded out the environment variables a ton, making it more customizable, (with default values in place of couse) this could appeal to a huge range of people.
Can you explain? I provide an interface for everything available in lemmy.hjson
, so I am not sure what else I would add.
I will note though, this is primarily intended for beginners. More advanced users would probably prefer to manage this on their own with Docker Compose, and those people will be very well versed in messing with the environment variables and all that.
If there are variables you want to pass in, you can simply edit docker-compose.yml.template
to import an env_file
, that way you can pass anything you want into the container.
I will definitely try this out. I already have my domain and SSL certificate. This will work on linode right?
It will work on pretty much anything that has a public IP and a domain pointing to that IP. The only thing that won't work "out of the box" for most users is email, as most VPS providers block port 25. If you've requested access to port 25 and have been approved to use it, you can edit config.env
to turn on the email service.
As for your SSL certificate, unfortunately this does not support importing your own certificate. It's made for beginners, after all :p
But there should be no problems with Caddy simply requesting a new one for you!
based
Nice! Looks like it even has update checker as well. Is there any reason why pictrs
is not included in the update checker and hardcoded to version 0.3.1?
The Lemmy maintainers themselves seem to lock it at 0.3.1, and I wanted to maintain parity with their deployment. I know pictrs
is up to at least 0.3.3
, and has a release candidate for 0.4
, but upstream Lemmy uses 0.3.1
for whatever reason, so that's why I lock it there.
It's excluded from the update checker because I don't have a stable way to check what version upstream is using. The Lemmy update checker just checks to see what the latest tag on LemmyNet/lemmy
is. I could try and pull the latest Gitea tag for pictrs
, but since upstream Lemmy isn't using the latest version, that's not really an option as something might break.
I considered trying to parse their docker-compose.yml file to see what version they use, but they seem to be restructuring their docker
folder right now. The folder in main
is completely different from the one tagged 0.17.4
. If I assume a certain directory path for that file for every version after this, but they move it, my script will break. Sadly, until their Docker deployment files seem like they're going unchanged for a good few versions, I'll have to do it manually for now.
I see, looks like it's a correct decision to me. Let the Lemmy developers worry about which version of pictrs to use themselves.
I just made a post about having issues with getting a fully functional instance so I think I'm gonna give this a try.
I hope it works out for you!
Quick note: For email, pretty much every VPS provider out there blocks port 25, which is needed for emails to send. They do this to prevent spam emails from being sent en-masse from their servers. This is likely why your Ansible installation is not sending emails.
Since it's uncommon for servers to support email, this script disables it by default. If your provider supports port 25 (or you get approved to use it, some VPS providers allow you to request access), check config.env
and set USE_EMAIL
to true
. This will set up everything you need for email.
I haven't been able to test email, so let me know how it works if you do! This doesn't do any of the DNS verification some email provders require, so your emails might be sent to spam. Lemmy doesn't really have documentation about how to set this up properly. If someone makes guidelines for this, I can update my project to do that automatically as well.
Wow, I'll definitely look into this, thanks! Even if I don't use it, it still may be useful just reading through it.
Thanks, this looks really nice. Bookmarked :)
Looks really good. I did it pretty much the same way, myself - but if I were looking to start again, I would definitely use this.
Edit: Ran it on a fresh AWS Ubuntu instance and it worked perfectly fine.
Will try this tomorrow. Tried them all. Nothing seems to work! I have been at it the whole week trying.
As someone who spent hours figuring out how to deploy through Ansible, how dare you ~/s~ But seriously thank you for putting in the work to make creating an instance more attainable for people.
Thanks for the helpful tool! Posting this from my new single-user Lemmy instance. I ended up tweaking the compose template a bit to remove Caddy since I already have it running on this VPS for other services. Wasn't too bad to just take the Caddyfile information and add it to my own existing framework.
Works great on Linode!!
This was absolutely amazing. I was having some trouble with the build process using the docker compose from Lemmy itself, but this just instantly worked. Thank you!