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

  • neetly@lemmy.worldEnglish
    9·
    1 year ago

    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.

      • neetly@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        I’m just a novice hobbyist (the only server I’ve put together was a homebridge server years ago) so the learning curve for this was relatively high putting together a VPS, setting up ssh, learning how to properly configure, and there were some errors when running the playbook I had to slowly figure out. Honestly though once it was all done, I thought “man, that was actually pretty easy” and I learned a lot so that was really cool

  • Yolk@yiffit.netEnglish
    6·
    1 year ago

    Literally been thinking about this so thank you beautiful brained individual. Would you mind if I shouted this in the YSK group?

  • untilyouarrived@lemmy.gtfo.socialEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • Eddie@lucitt.socialEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    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!!

  • redcalcium@c.calciumlabs.comEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    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?

    • ubergeek77@lemmy.ubergeek77.chatOPEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • redcalcium@c.calciumlabs.comEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        I see, looks like it’s a correct decision to me. Let the Lemmy developers worry about which version of pictrs to use themselves.

  • Thief@lemmy.myserv.oneEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    I used this and the developer is very helpful. Works great. Helped me even upgrade to 0.18.0.

  • mfn@mfn.pubEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    After trying to do it with docker or ansible manually for hours and failing, this was soo helpful. So thank you.

  • orca@orcas.enjoying.yachtsEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    This was the only tool that I was able to get running. I recommend it to anyone curious about running their own instance. I tried both the official Ansible and Docker instructions, and neither worked.

  • delcake@lemmy.songsforno.oneEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • Marxine@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    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!