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!
I tried to run your script on a proxmox Debian 12 lxc but i hit a few issues… i already run a reverse proxy etc…
So… what VPS would you recommend to run this on ? It will literally only be for myself to maintain my subscriptions and have a singular account…
Unfortunately, Lemmy Easy Deploy isn’t well suited for running behind a reverse proxy. It is a complete “do everything for me,” and I don’t have a good way to support people running a webserver already. I’ve pushed an update a few minutes ago, so you can try playing with the ports and maybe turning off Caddy’s TLS (so that certificates are managed by your webserver instead of the one in LED), but I’m sorry to say you’re on your own in that case :(
Lemmy can basically run on a potato. Any VPS will do, but the main metric you’ll want to keep track of is disk space. Any $5/month instance will be fine.
I am a moderate-to-heavy user of Lemmy, and I go through about 700MB of new data per day. If you federate with less communities than me, this may be less for you. At my current rate of storage, I can go for about a month and a half before I have to worry about storage space.
After that, I’m thinking about clearing my thumbnail cache, and seeing if Lemmy has some way to prune old data. I haven’t been using Lemmy long enough to know what to do to clean things up, but if I figure out something clever in a month or two, I’ll share what I learn.
EDIT: Turns out ~90% of my Lemmy data is just for debugging and not needed:
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3103#issuecomment-1631643416
Hey, thank you for this, i was trying to get it up and running on my window machine following the instructions from join-lemmy site and couldn’t get it work at all, but this one deploy in minute!
Anyway, since i’m just trying to mess with the setting i didn’t get a domain for it, is there anyway setting i need to change so i can host it locally?
Hi @ubergeek77 Thanks for this tool! It’s great! Any possibility to integrate something like Mailgun for the email part? Would really be great to have this sending emails to users for account verification :)
You should be able to use the SMTP options in config.env to use Mailgun!
Ah yes. I actually went ahead with Oracle Cloud. Seems to be included in the always free package and worked straight away. Thanks again for this script. Super!
Hey man, thanks for putting this together. I’m trying to deploy this using UI and BE 0.18.4, but my BE container falls into a boot loop. Any insight on what I can try for this? https://imgur.com/a/Kv36gbB
Unfortunately, there is not a lot of information to go off of here. I was able to upgrade to 0.18.4 with no hitches, and I haven’t seen similar reports of this.
Are you using any custom configs? Do the logs for just the Lemmy service show you anything of note?
docker compose -p lemmy-easy-deploy logs lemmyIn the past, Lemmy itself has had some strange edge cases causing crashes, such as an improper audit log value causing the entire audit log to fail. It’s possible this is a similar case, in which case you may need to file a bug on Lemmy’s tracker.
You are welcome to file an issue with some more information and logs, but if this is an issue caused by a bug in Lemmy, unfortunately I won’t be able to fix it.
If you’re still having issues, feel free to give me some more info on my tracker and I can take a look:
Thanks for the response! I probably won’t be able to look at this again until the weekend. That’s good to hear that you’ve had 0.18.4 working. I’ve been testing this out on Ubuntu server 22.04 in a Windows Hyper-V VM.
I’ll gather what I can and get back to you. Thanks again.
What Cloudflare API am I supposed to use?
