I am a software developer by craft and a linux system admin by hobby. I cannot commit to moderating and managing my own instance, but I would be glad to help someone with the technical aspects.

The most common complaint I saw in Reddit and here about switching to Lemmy is the difficulty of setting it up, so I thought I would help bridge this gap.

While I have never hosted my own instance before, I already checked the setup guide and it looks pretty simple to me, so I am confident I can do it. Please feel free to comment or DM.

It would be great if you can comment general questions. I can then respond to you here and maybe others will see it and know how to host their own instances too.

  • FatherZen@lemmy.one
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    1 year ago

    An up to date step by step instruction for docker, ansible, or scratch setup would be a fantastic step in the right direction. I’m not a complete moron, but I feel the current guides are lacking. There’s a lot of assumptions on the admins knowledge of the associated systems beforehand. As someone else said, the first to make a turnkey solution… hot dog. Would absolutely blast adoption into space.

    • foispan@terefere.eu
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      1 year ago

      What was it you were struggling with? I found the guide to be straightforward, but I also have a tech background similar to OP

      • Wintermute@lemmy.villa-straylight.social
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        1 year ago

        I likewise have a similar background to the OP. I wouldn’t say I struggled (thanks to the Matrix chat room), but the docker instructions straight up didn’t work a couple of days ago. I and another guys submitted a couple of PRs and I think the instructions should at least work for common setups now, but the edges are very rough.

        By far the best way to contribute IMO is submitting PRs. The devs seem very willing to take contributions without making you jump through hoops.

  • SmugBedBug@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    Thanks for offering your knowledge! I successfully set up and instance using their docker installation guide. However I was never able to get the smtp server to work. I first tried to add postfix to the docker-compose file like they have in the ansible installation example on github, but that didn’t work. Just trying to add an email address to my account would stall the UI with a spinning animation on the Save button. I then tried to update the hjson config file by adding my sendgrid api credentials and removing postfix from docker compose. That gave me the same result. At that point I kinda gave up and deleted my vps. I don’t have access to my error logs anymore, but I can spin up a new vps to try to get the same errors again if needed.

    • Andreas@feddit.dk
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      1 year ago

      A lot of VPS providers block port 25 (and other email ports) because they don’t want people to set up bot spam mail servers on their services. Could that be the issue?

    • elrac@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Amazon has a very generous free tier for outgoing email in SES, and it is pretty easy to set up.

    • Chromozone@lemmy.chromozone.dev
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      1 year ago

      If you have Cloudflare you can set up an email alias for incoming email and then create a secondary Gmail address on top of your existing one for outgoing email. If you go to ‘Settings > Accounts and Import > Send mail as’ and add another email address (not an alias) with the same email as the one you setup on Cloudflare (noreply@yourdomain.com). You will likely need to create a Gmail app password to sign into the email server if you use 2FA.

      Once you’ve created this email Gmail will send you a confirmation email to confirm it’s all working. Then you can just enter Google’s SMTP server info for Lemmy along with your email (your actual email, not the CF one), and the app password you created.

      If done it this way for a few services beyond Lemmy and it’s worked well so far. This way you’re also using a Gmail account technically so you can hopefully avoid blacklists and spam filters.

  • lee@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    Do you think it would be possible to host using a raspberry pi 4?

    How much traffic does Lemmy create daily?

    • losttourist@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      CPU requirements for Lemmy hosting are minimal. Memory is useful - you’d want to use the Pi 4 with either the 4GB or 8GB RAM, anything less than that will work but you’ll be running the risk of difficulties if the server gets busy.

      You’ll also need plenty of storage, especially if people are going to start uploading media to your Lemmy host. Given that a Pi runs off an SD card you might well find yourself running out of storage space - I’d recommend attaching a USB storage device for the reassurance in that respect.

    • Beto@lemmy.studio
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      1 year ago

      I run lemmy.studio on a VPS with 1GB of ram and 1 VCPU, so a raspi4 should suffice, at least initially. Bandwidth is around 7.5 Mbps.

  • Barbarian@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    I feel like there’s a lot of money on the table for the first person to set up a turnkey hosting platform for Lemmy. Something like MoltenHosting but for Lemmy instead of Foundry.

  • Treevan 🇦🇺@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    Perhaps write a thread, with step-by-step text and photos/screenshots per platform? And then the next one to do would be a step-by-step video?

    Example, I’m not technically minded, but have an Unraid box with a 1Gb connection. There are extra steps there that I’m aware of but have no idea how to do because it’s over my head.

  • Les Orchard@links.decafbad.com
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    1 year ago

    I’ve been playing with my own single-user instance here using Docker. Mostly I just followed the Lemmy docs. It’s been nice & responsive and takes barely any resources, so far. I think this system can really benefit from a lot of small instances to spread the load.

  • fuser@quex.cc
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    1 year ago

    Hi there - thanks for posting. I’m serving lemmy (ansible install) on nginx from Ubuntu 22.04 and I’m seeing this weird problem sometimes where the submit button is not enabled on the “create post” form. Sometimes it works but then it inexplicably stubbornly refuses to - I am not seeing any apparent error show up in the console, nothing in the lemmy or nginx logs (naturally, because the HTML form isn’t submitting to the server because the submit button’s disabled). Happens in different browsers, tried restarting nginx, rebooting, nothing seems to fix it. Now, my addled brain does recall seeing something about Ubuntu 22.04 having some issues with Lemmy and perhaps that’s what I’m seeing - it’s just weird and I’ve never seen a web app do this before - any ideas? The url is quex.cc and you’re welcome to test there if you like, but I’m really just looking for any suggestions for investigation before I start thinking about moving to a different OS.

      • fuser@quex.cc
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        1 year ago

        yes, good suggestion, thank you - although before I do I’m going to spend a bit of time to see if I can isolate the problem - I just tested it from a mobile device and the local PC browser and it’s working now. I used the exact same url, text and everything to create the post and I didn’t change anything - didn’t reboot, didn’t even restart the browser. Except for the fact that it’s intermittent, it looks like some kind of js or css problem, but I need to replicate it and if I do that, I’ll probably be able to figure it out.

        • fuser@quex.cc
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          1 year ago

          I realize how stupid I’ll sound admitting this, but I think the problem was that I wasn’t selecting the “community” in the pulldown, so the submit button wasn’t enabled.

  • arkcom@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Something that would help a lot of selfhoster types would be prebuild docker images and a good example docker compose. (something kbin could also use)

  • smstnitc@lemmy2.addictmud.org
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    1 year ago

    Being a highly technical guy, I struggled to get everything running on the server that I am hosting other things on. The biggest hurdle was letsencrypt, but other things weren’t working quite right. I ended up just paying for a new ubuntu vps so I can run the ansible playbook (I use arch linux everywhere else). That turned out to be super simple and “just worked”.

  • dibs@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I was playing with the idea of spinning up a VPS through AWS lightsail since the bundled package it provides seems to be cheaper than configuring an EC2 instance/other requisite resources running 24/7.

    What has been people’s experience regarding:

    • Monthly data upload rates (since most cloud providers charge internet egress per gigabyte)
    • Database/image storage requirements
    • kiwi@kale.social
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      1 year ago

      Hosting a single user instance, I’m seeing a few GB of network traffic over the past few days and maybe 10Gb at most needed for the disk.

  • Chromozone@lemmy.chromozone.dev
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    1 year ago

    The thing I struggled with the most was adapting the provided docker-compose.yml for my Caddy setup.

    I am using caddy-docker-proxy, which I absolutely love but their documentation is not the greatest for matchers.

    If anyone else wants a super basic Lemmy instance running on Caddy with their domain on Cloudflare here is a docker-compose.yml

    Please make sure you update your lemmy.hjson hostname field to match the domain you used in the docker-compose.yml for the caddy labels

    If you’re not using Cloudflare you can replace build: . (and not use the Dockerfile I provided below) in the caddy service with image: lucaslorentz/caddy-docker-proxy:ci-alpine (and remove the caddy.acme_dns label) and I believe it will fall back to Let’sEncrypt

    version: "3.9"
    
    services:
      caddy:
        container_name: caddy
        build: .
        depends_on:
          - lemmy-ui
          - pictrs
        ports:
          - 80:80
          - 443:443
        environment:
          CADDY_INGRESS_NETWORKS: caddy
        networks:
          - caddy
        volumes:
          - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock
          - /opt/docker/caddy/data:/data
          - /opt/docker/caddy/config:/config
        labels:
          caddy.log.format: console
          caddy.acme_dns: cloudflare YOUR_CLOUDFLARE_API_TOKEN
        restart: unless-stopped
      lemmy:
        container_name: lemmy
        image: dessalines/lemmy:0.17.3
        depends_on:
          - postgres
          - pictrs
        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"
        networks:
          - caddy
        volumes:
          - /opt/docker/lemmy/lemmy.hjson:/config/config.hjson:ro
        labels:
          caddy: "your.domain.com"
          caddy.@lemmy: path_regexp ^/(api|pictrs|feeds|nodeinfo|\.well-known)/.*$
          caddy.@post: method POST
          caddy.@accept: header Accept application/*
          caddy.reverse_proxy_1: "@lemmy {{upstreams 8536}}"
          caddy.reverse_proxy_2: "@post {{upstreams 8536}}"
          caddy.reverse_proxy_3: "@accept {{upstreams 8536}}"
        restart: unless-stopped
      lemmy-ui:
        container_name: lemmy-ui
        image: dessalines/lemmy-ui:0.17.3
        depends_on:
          - lemmy
        environment:
          LEMMY_UI_LEMMY_INTERNAL_HOST: lemmy:8536
          LEMMY_UI_LEMMY_EXTERNAL_HOST: localhost:1234
          LEMMY_HTTPS: true
        networks:
          - caddy
        labels:
          caddy: "your.domain.com"
          caddy.reverse_proxy: "{{upstreams 1234}}"
        restart: unless-stopped
      pictrs:
        container_name: pictrs
        image: asonix/pictrs:0.3.1
        environment:
          PICTRS__API_KEY: API_KEY
        user: 991:991
        volumes:
          - /opt/docker/pictrs:/mnt
        networks:
          - caddy
      postgres:
        container_name: postgres
        image: postgres:15-alpine
        environment:
          POSTGRES_DB: lemmy
          POSTGRES_USER: lemmy
          POSTGRES_PASSWORD: password
        volumes:
          - /opt/docker/postgres:/var/lib/postgresql/data
        networks:
          - caddy
        restart: unless-stopped
    
    networks:
      caddy:
        external: true
    

    Here is the Dockerfile used for the caddy container:

    ARG CADDY_VERSION=2.6.4
    
    FROM caddy:${CADDY_VERSION}-builder AS builder
    
    RUN xcaddy build \
        --with github.com/lucaslorentz/caddy-docker-proxy/v2@v2.8.4 \
        --with github.com/caddy-dns/cloudflare
    
    FROM caddy:${CADDY_VERSION}-alpine
    
    RUN apk add --no-cache tzdata
    
    COPY --from=builder /usr/bin/caddy /usr/bin/caddy
    
    CMD ["caddy", "docker-proxy"]
    
  • MyopicTopic@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Anyone know if setting up an instance via a shared Hostgator server is possible? I already pay for a plan for my personal site so wondered if I could add on a new domain plus a partition to it and take advantage to make my own instance for posting and browsing myself.

      • MyopicTopic@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        It’s a web hosting service. The plan I have is the baby plan shared hosting on this link.

        But from looking more myself, not sure if this would work. I think I’d need a VPS to actually install and build Lemmy on.

        • ChaosAD@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          yes you would need a VPS. The only way to use lemmy with hostgator is if they add lemmy to their services like they do with wordpress for example.

  • lixus98@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I haven’t checked but are kbin instances easier to spin up? Kbin is be able to communicate with Lemmy communities without a problem.

    • @lixus98
      @cyclohexane

      It’s easy from the docker from what I can tell, the bare metal / vps is a bit more as more manual pieces but nothing too crazy. I just submitted a pull request for the admin guide so that should help a bit for less head bashing… Though my instance doesn’t seem to be federating so that’s a new problem for tomorrow.

    • kbrot@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      My two cents, I had a wobbly Lemmy instance setup that couldn’t do HTTPS, federation, and stay stable all at once. It was always 1 or 2 of those 3 at best.

      Switched my instance to kbin, which took about a half hour of CLI and after that has been a joy. It’s just younger and admittedly less feature packed right now.