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!
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 thedocker-compose.yml
and placed thelemmy.hjson
in this same folder too.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 :(
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:
docker-compose.yml.template
to something that won’t conflict with your webserver. Take note of what port you used for80
config.env
and setCADDY_DISABLE_TLS
totrue
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!
Thanks!
Just one more if you don’t mind, please.
Here should not be displaying the ports for
lemmy-ui
andlemmy-postgres
too?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