I’m trying to stand up a Lemmy instance, and for some reason I’m just not getting it. I’ve got a fair bit of experience in Linux and Docker. NPM is new to me, but doesn’t seem difficult.
I’ve looked over several walkthroughs but it seems like they all don’t quite work right. Does someone have a clear step-by-step that works, or could take the time to remote in and help me get this up?
I’m running on VMWare ESXi, and I’ve tried both Debian and Ubuntu to get the server up. Closest I got, the Docker containers would start but seem to be throwing errors internally and don’t connect to one another.
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Did you try the docker-compose file referenced in these instructions? It worked first try for me. The hardest part was proxying externally. I’m used to using SWAG so I had to get the nginx config working with SWAG.
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/administration/install_docker.html
I’m giving it a go at the moment. Have you looked at the ansible playbook available at https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ansible ?
I did. I could never get ansible to work when I was setting up the same machine. If you know how to set the inventory file up for that, I’m all ears.
I’m just going through it now. I’ll keep you posted
I’m currently hitting an issue of lets encrypt failing to authenticate using the .well-known. The domain in the hosts file is lemmy.domain.com though I have a feeling this may have to be the FQDN. the base domain is currently being used by matrix to serve antoher .well-known so it looks like I’ll have to add another page there somewhere.
yes, the domain in the hosts file needs to be the fqdn. Let’s encrypt will look for the auth file at the root of that. if you are already using this fqdn/webroot you’ll need another cname.
I don’t think I’m using the root for anything, just domain.com/.well-known/matrix/server. Would I be able to serve the challenge at domain.com/.well-known/acme-challenge/stringofcharacters?
I think so. letsencrypt will only be looking for the file that certbot creates, so as long as it can resolve the fqdn to your host and port 80 (http://yourdoma.in) is navigable, then you should be good.
certbot certonly --manual is what I need though I think cloudflare or something else is making it only resolve to https. I’m going to shelf this for now and come back to it later. Thanks for your help
So I wanted to make a top-level post: I’ve got a set of example files, and instructions, that will work 100% of the time on Debian. What do you guys think would be the best way to share them? A post here and the files shared on Google Drive? GitHub? Definitely open to suggestions, but I don’t want anyone to struggle with it as hard as I have.
oh man. super valuable. I would love to have that, as setting up Lemmy on Debian 12 is in my near future.
Here we go:
Any place you see <something>, you need to change it to fit and omit the <>. If something <matches> in two differet places <matches> like this, make sure they match when you’re done as well. Specifically, the postgres user and password in the lemmy docker file and the lemmy.hjson.
Finally, in Google drive the files end in .txt so you can view them. You’ll need to correct the file names when you download them if you intend to use them. You should have two docker-compose.yml, one in each of the two directories you create, and one lemmy.hjson.
From a fresh CLI Debian 11 install:
su /sbin/usermod -aG sudo <user> groups <user> apt-get install sudo cd /opt mkdir npm cd npm (copy or create docker-compose.yml) apt-get install docker-compose docker-compose up -d cd /opt mkdir lemmy cd lemmy (copy or create docker-compose.yml and lemmy.hjson) mkdir -p volumes/pictrs chown -R 991:991 volumes/pictrs docker-compose up -d docker ps (verify containers are all running, grab ip address for lemmy container) Configure port forwarding in npm for your lemmy container (npm should be accessible at debian_ip_address:81) Remember to do the custom paths from the various guides. The lemmy port in this guide is 1234.Please note I am not addressing federation or SSL or true hosting yet. I haven’t got that far yet. But if you can get the damn thing running, the last mile shouldn’t be too bad.
