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!
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
I unretired an old racknerd vps and got it running on there… works great!
Just need to now figure out how to move it to something that can actually cope with it lol…
Any ideas how to backup an instance and move it?
I guess it would be a matter of getting a new VPS, pointing my domain to it, reinstalling and then moving over the .live folder?
Yes, you will want to copy the entirety of the
Lemmy-Easy-Deployfolder recursively, including thelivefolder.However, all important data is also stored in Docker volumes on the system. There isn’t a great way to migrate Docker volumes between systems, but there are a few options. One I have not personally used, but seems to look good, is
vackup:https://github.com/BretFisher/docker-vackup
You’ll want to run
docker volume lson your current system, and make sure that when you migrate them to the new system, all the volume names are exactly the same. Then, if you rundeploy.sh -f, it should pick everything up and deploy.Do note: if Docker Compose itself does not create the volume with the right tags, it will still work, but it will print some warnings to the console. Here is an issue discussing it and some potential hacks you can use to add the right tags:
https://github.com/docker/compose/issues/10087
Finally, if you need to re-create a volume on the new system with tags like the above issue mentions, you can try migrating data over between named volumes on the same system using this helpful oneliner (don’t forget to change the volume names in all the places in this command):
https://www.commands.dev/workflows/rename_docker_volume
In short, it’s a bit hacky, but it can be done.
Good luck!