I’m giving it a go at the moment. Have you looked at the ansible playbook available at https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ansible ?

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

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.

Hopefully this will help someone. This seems to work for me. Subscribed communities update, I am able to post. I’m the only user right now on my server. NPM took me a bit of messing around with the config but I think I have everything working, some of this may be redundant / non functional but I don’t have the will to go line by line to see what more I can take out. Here is how I have it configured. Note that some things go to the Lemmy UI port and some to the Lemmy port. These should be defined in your docker-compose if you’re using that. (Mine is below)

On the first tab in NPM, “Details” I have the following:

Scheme: http
Hostname: <docker ip>
Port: <lemmy-ui port>
Block Common Exploits and Websockets Support are enabled.

On the Custom Locations page, I added 4 locations, you have to do one for each directory even though the ip/ports are the same.

Location: /api
Scheme: http
Hostname: <docker ip>
Port: <lemmy port>

Repeat the above for “/feeds”, “/pictrs”, and “/nodeinfo”. The example file they give also says to have “.well_known” in there but as far as I know that’s just for Let’s Encrypt which NPM should be handling for us.

On the SSL tab, I have a Let’s Encrypt certificate set up. Force SSL, HTTP/2 Support, and HSTS Enabled.

On the Advanced tab, I have the following:

 location / {

   set $proxpass "http://<docker ip>:<lemmy-ui port>";
   if ($http_accept = "application/activity+json") {

     set $proxpass "http://<docker ip>:<lemmy-ui port>";`
   }
   if ($http_accept = "application/ld+json; profile=\"https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams\"") {
     set $proxpass "http://<docker ip>:<lemmy-ui port>";
   }
   if ($request_method = POST) {
     set $proxpass "http://<docker ip>:<lemmy-ui port>";
   }
   proxy_pass $proxpass;
   
   rewrite ^(.+)/+$ $1 permanent;
    # Send actual client IP upstream
   proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
   proxy_set_header Host $host;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
 }

I probably should add in my docker compose file as well… I’m far from a docker expert. This is reasonably close to their examples and others I found. I removed nginx from in here since we already have a proxy. I disabled all the debug logging because it was using disk space. I also removed all the networking lines because I’m not smart enough to figure it all out right now. If you use this, look out for the < > sections, you need to set your own domain/hostname, and postgres user/password.

version: "3.3"

services:
  lemmy:
    image: dessalines/lemmy:0.17.3
    hostname: lemmy
    restart: always
    ports:
      - 8536:8536
    environment:
      - RUST_LOG="warn"
      - RUST_BACKTRACE=full
    volumes:
      - ./lemmy.hjson:/config/config.hjson:Z
    depends_on:
      - postgres
      - pictrs

  lemmy-ui:
    image: dessalines/lemmy-ui:0.17.4
    # use this to build your local lemmy ui image for development
    # run docker compose up --build
    # assuming lemmy-ui is cloned besides lemmy directory
    # build:
    #   context: ../../lemmy-ui
    #   dockerfile: dev.dockerfile
    ports:
      - 1234:1234
    environment:
      # this needs to match the hostname defined in the lemmy service
      - LEMMY_UI_LEMMY_INTERNAL_HOST=lemmy:8536
      # set the outside hostname here
      - LEMMY_UI_LEMMY_EXTERNAL_HOST=< domain name>
      - LEMMY_HTTPS=false
      - LEMMY_UI_DEBUG=true
    depends_on:
      - lemmy
    restart: always

  pictrs:
    image: asonix/pictrs:0.4.0-beta.19
    # this needs to match the pictrs url in lemmy.hjson
    hostname: pictrs
    # we can set options to pictrs like this, here we set max. image size and forced format for conversion
    # entrypoint: /sbin/tini -- /usr/local/bin/pict-rs -p /mnt -m 4 --image-format webp
    environment:
      - PICTRS_OPENTELEMETRY_URL=http://otel:4137
      - PICTRS__API_KEY=API_KEY
      - RUST_LOG=debug
      - RUST_BACKTRACE=full
      - PICTRS__MEDIA__VIDEO_CODEC=vp9
      - PICTRS__MEDIA__GIF__MAX_WIDTH=256
      - PICTRS__MEDIA__GIF__MAX_HEIGHT=256
      - PICTRS__MEDIA__GIF__MAX_AREA=65536
      - PICTRS__MEDIA__GIF__MAX_FRAME_COUNT=400
    user: 991:991
    volumes:
      - ./volumes/pictrs:/mnt:Z
    restart: always

  postgres:
    image: postgres:15-alpine
    # this needs to match the database host in lemmy.hson
    # Tune your settings via
    # https://pgtune.leopard.in.ua/#/
    # You can use this technique to add them here
    # https://stackoverflow.com/a/30850095/1655478
    hostname: postgres
    command:
      [
        "postgres",
        "-c",
        "session_preload_libraries=auto_explain",
        "-c",
        "auto_explain.log_min_duration=5ms",
        "-c",
        "auto_explain.log_analyze=true",
        "-c",
        "track_activity_query_size=1048576",
      ]
    ports:
      # use a different port so it doesnt conflict with potential postgres db running on the host
      - "5433:5432"
    environment:
      - POSTGRES_USER=< dbuser >
      - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=< dbpassword>
      - POSTGRES_DB=lemmy
    volumes:
      - ./volumes/postgres:/var/lib/postgresql/data:Z
    restart: always

There’s another post over here https://fernchat.esotericmonkey.com/post/277 with a similar setup, less stuff in the Advanced tab. If I’m bad at explaining maybe another guide will help.

could you paste your docker-compose file ? This would help a bit.

Hey - I found the same thing WRT the docker files - the compose files from the official project are ever-so-subtly wrong.

Tagging a docker network as internal blocks outside network comms afaik so the default compose file essentially puts the lemmy server inside its own little sandbox and prevents it from communciating with other servers.

The solution I found was to add lemmy to both the internal network and the external proxy network:

## this is what the networks part looks like by default
networks:                                                                                                                                                   
  # communication to web and clients                                                                                                                        
  lemmyexternalproxy:                                                                                                                                       
  # communication between lemmy services                                                                                                                    
  lemmyinternal:                                                                                                                                            
    driver: bridge                                                                                                                                          
    internal: true            

#... other stuff here
#lemmy service inside your services: section
  lemmy:
    image: dessalines/lemmy:0.17.3
    hostname: lemmy
    networks:
      - lemmyinternal
      - lemmyexternalproxy # this is the important addition
    restart: always
    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,l
emmy_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

Another thing I noticed was that in the documentation they bind nginx on port 80 but the docker-compose provided binds to port 8536 which is the default port that lemmy seems to listen on. I bound 8536 to my host machine and use caddy as a reverse proxy (because it does letsencrypt for you which is nice).

(Writing to you now from my self-hosted instance which I set up with the above notes)

I just set it up from a git checkout, and it was pretty involved – the build instructions are actually quite a bit better than usual for development software at this stage, but it’s still a complicated process with some changes vs. what’s in the instructions. If you’re open to that route, I can try to document what I did in more detail + send it along and give some help if you get stuck.

I tried many methods but ended up having to use Ansible. That worked without a hitch.

Sucks I had to spin up a new server for it though but that’s the cost of decentralisation I guess