this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023
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72
Lemmy on a raspberry pi (self.selfhosted)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by blotz to c/selfhosted
31 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Does anyone run their own Lemmy instance on a pi? How was the process of setting it up? Were there any pitfalls? How is performance?

[Edit] So a lot of testing around. Compiling from scratch, etc, etc...

So far i have tried

  • installing lemmy using rootless docker (on 0.17.3)
  • compiling the image 0.18 docker image as arm

rootless docker did not work well for me. lots of systemd issues and i gave up after running into a lot of issues. I tried rootless docker for security reasons. minimal permissions, etc.

When trying to compile the latest lemmy image in arm, i ran into issues with muslrust not having an arm version. It might be worth investigating rewriting the docker file from 0.17.3 to work with 0.18.0 but i haven't investigated that fully yet! I tried compiling the latest image because i wanted to be able to use the latest features

At the moment, I'm trying to set lemmy to run under bare metal. Im currently attempting to compile lemmy under arm. If that works, i'll start setting up .service files to start up lemmy and pictrs.

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[–] marsara9 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I was able to get it setup, main things to watch out for:

  • Don't use the provided docker compose file. Or more precisely don't build from source and lookup the correct image tag on docker hub first.
  • The documentation was a bit confusing. This isn't really specific for the Pi but since I was creating a compose file from scratch some of the steps listed didn't quite explain all of the details.

I only used it for testing purposes, but performance was fine (on a Pi4 4gb). Note I only ever had one user.

[–] TheInsane42 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

As I only want to use it for myself as jump-off point (and to mess around a tad) I'm fine with performance on an RPi4 (have the 8 GB version), but I'm struggling to get it next to the rest in my Debian install on it.

Local install fails as I need imagemagick 7 (Debian still had 6.9), and it refuses to compile with imei method. (that script wants to use /usr/local/bin/identify which I think it needs to install itself (part of imagemagick) and the compose file I couldn't get to work with an external (already hosted) postgres.

Any tips? I'm totally new with docker and ansible.

[–] marsara9 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So in the official docker-compose.yml lines that define where/how to get the image for that application.

For example:

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/c9e9ff46faa40e2642343effb117693bfa525c5f/docker/docker-compose.yml#L41-L43

build:
      context: ../
      dockerfile: docker/Dockerfile

This tells docker to look for a file called docker/Dockerfile in the parent directory. This means that when you go to call docker compose up -d it will build an image from source using that Dockerfile. For the Pi we don't want this (at least as of 0.17.x; I haven't tested 0.18.0 yet).

Instead we want to use a pre-built image. To do that we need to go to docker hub, specifically: https://hub.docker.com/r/dessalines/lemmy/tags and find the latest tag that matches the architecture of the system we're building on. I assume you're on a Pi4 running a 64bit so, so that gives us 0.17.3-linux-arm64. After you've got that tag we just need to replace those 3 lines above with:

image: dessalines/lemmy:0.17.3-linux-arm64

Now when we go to call docker compose up -d it will pull down that prebuilt image instead of building for source. Btw, you'll want to do the same for the lemmy-ui service.

P.S. I don't have much experience using Ansible, so I can't help here. I normally just SSH directly into the Pi and do everything there.

[–] TheInsane42 1 points 1 year ago

Oh wait, I forgot, compose .yaml syntax is (almost) the same as Ansible, so no need for Ansible. Thanks for pointing to the docker images. I'll start messing about with those. Still need to pick an fqdn for those instances. Do I want to use lemmy.my.domain or direct my.domain. (as it's by all means mine anyway)