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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.
It will work on pretty much anything that has a public IP and a domain pointing to that IP. The only thing that won’t work “out of the box” for most users is email, as most VPS providers block port 25. If you’ve requested access to port 25 and have been approved to use it, you can edit config.env to turn on the email service.
As for your SSL certificate, unfortunately this does not support importing your own certificate. It’s made for beginners, after all :p
But there should be no problems with Caddy simply requesting a new one for you!
how well do those email servers work to begin with? i just flat out disabled the postfix relay on my instance and simply configured sendgrid, which works perfectly, no delays or spam folder issues (although i did have to disable a bunch of tracking bullshit). doing so with similar services has been my go-to card in freelance webdev, because getting other mail servers to trust you can be hard, so i’m interested in the experience people are having with those. (i’d much prefer to self-host email too, but providing a good experience is the primary goal)
I haven’t actually used the embedded postfix server at all, I keep mine disabled. I only include it because it’s “included” in the official Docker deployment files, and I try to keep this deployment as close to that as possible.
I’m considering adding support for an external email service, as you mentioned, but I have nearly zero experience in using managed email services, and I’m not sure if non-technical users would be able to navigate the configuration of things I can’t do for them (i.e. on a web dashboard somewhere). And if I can’t do it for them, it means more issues for me, so I hesitate to add support for it at all.
I’d love to hear your experience in setting up sendgrid and how easy that was. And the tracking stuff you mentioned as well.
I’m not sure what you mean? Most people are just self hosting instances for themselves, where email isn’t needed. My instance doesn’t have an email service.
And as I explained, if email is something you want, I have an advanced option for this. It’s not the default because there is not a public VPS host out there that lets you use port 25 without special approval.
Email config is needed for lost passwords. It’s also needed for account verification, if you run without verification you could easily become a place for people to abuse other servers and get yourself defederated.
Many web hosts have poisoned mail IPs, so setting up with a smtp config to a well known site server is required if you want your emails to be delivered.
You can’t have the checkbox for federation and private, the server will crash and tell you that in the lemmy log. Had that happen when I did thy to setup without email the first time.
“Private instance” and “disable registration” are not the same thing. There are separate options for both. It is possible to run a federated single-user instance with registrations disabled. That’s how I run mine.
Private and federation are mutually exclusive concepts. Private instances are ones that intentionally don’t federate - like a private company community that’s locked to their intranet. For self hosted Lemmy instances you just need to close registration. Then since no one can apply, the only use case for email becomes the Forgot Password button for if you forget your password and at that point you’re better served with a password manager.
And that is why I don’t advertise this as supporting email out of the box, and why it’s an advanced option without any support from me. The embedded postfix server is part of the official Docker Compose deployment from upstream Lemmy, and it’s part of the officially supported Ansible deployment too. Those deployment methods are what this is modeled after. That is as far as I go on email support. If upstream Lemmy started including some automatic AWS SNS configuration, I would adopt it, but they have not done so.
Everyone who has reported success to me so far are running single user instances for themselves. That is my target audience, and for that audience (and myself), email is not even close to being a hard requirement.
However, if you would like to improve this script by adding support for more robust and secure email systems, I would be happy if you submitted a PR to do just that :)
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It will work on pretty much anything that has a public IP and a domain pointing to that IP. The only thing that won’t work “out of the box” for most users is email, as most VPS providers block port 25. If you’ve requested access to port 25 and have been approved to use it, you can edit
config.envto turn on the email service.As for your SSL certificate, unfortunately this does not support importing your own certificate. It’s made for beginners, after all :p
But there should be no problems with Caddy simply requesting a new one for you!
I think I have successfully got the server running on my linode.
I’m glad to hear that! Thanks for letting me know, it’s nice to hear people were able to use my script to get up and running :)
how well do those email servers work to begin with? i just flat out disabled the postfix relay on my instance and simply configured sendgrid, which works perfectly, no delays or spam folder issues (although i did have to disable a bunch of tracking bullshit). doing so with similar services has been my go-to card in freelance webdev, because getting other mail servers to trust you can be hard, so i’m interested in the experience people are having with those. (i’d much prefer to self-host email too, but providing a good experience is the primary goal)
I haven’t actually used the embedded postfix server at all, I keep mine disabled. I only include it because it’s “included” in the official Docker deployment files, and I try to keep this deployment as close to that as possible.
I’m considering adding support for an external email service, as you mentioned, but I have nearly zero experience in using managed email services, and I’m not sure if non-technical users would be able to navigate the configuration of things I can’t do for them (i.e. on a web dashboard somewhere). And if I can’t do it for them, it means more issues for me, so I hesitate to add support for it at all.
I’d love to hear your experience in setting up sendgrid and how easy that was. And the tracking stuff you mentioned as well.
Email is vital to lemmy working. Saying this works without mail config is just silly.
I’m not sure what you mean? Most people are just self hosting instances for themselves, where email isn’t needed. My instance doesn’t have an email service.
And as I explained, if email is something you want, I have an advanced option for this. It’s not the default because there is not a public VPS host out there that lets you use port 25 without special approval.
Email config is needed for lost passwords. It’s also needed for account verification, if you run without verification you could easily become a place for people to abuse other servers and get yourself defederated.
Many web hosts have poisoned mail IPs, so setting up with a smtp config to a well known site server is required if you want your emails to be delivered.
Don’t lose your passwords and leave closed registration so only people you actually want on your instance are on it. You absolutely do not need email.
You can’t have the checkbox for federation and private, the server will crash and tell you that in the lemmy log. Had that happen when I did thy to setup without email the first time.
“Private instance” and “disable registration” are not the same thing. There are separate options for both. It is possible to run a federated single-user instance with registrations disabled. That’s how I run mine.
Weird. I used this script with no working email. How’s it going from my private instance that is federated?
Private and federation are mutually exclusive concepts. Private instances are ones that intentionally don’t federate - like a private company community that’s locked to their intranet. For self hosted Lemmy instances you just need to close registration. Then since no one can apply, the only use case for email becomes the Forgot Password button for if you forget your password and at that point you’re better served with a password manager.
And that is why I don’t advertise this as supporting email out of the box, and why it’s an advanced option without any support from me. The embedded postfix server is part of the official Docker Compose deployment from upstream Lemmy, and it’s part of the officially supported Ansible deployment too. Those deployment methods are what this is modeled after. That is as far as I go on email support. If upstream Lemmy started including some automatic AWS SNS configuration, I would adopt it, but they have not done so.
Everyone who has reported success to me so far are running single user instances for themselves. That is my target audience, and for that audience (and myself), email is not even close to being a hard requirement.
However, if you would like to improve this script by adding support for more robust and secure email systems, I would be happy if you submitted a PR to do just that :)