this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023

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Issues hosting Lemmy (via ansible) (self.selfhosted)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by aranym to c/selfhosted

10 comments fedilink hide all child comments

(Using https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ansible)

The ansible-playbook command itself connected to the VPS and completed without any errors or warnings. This is on a completely fresh VPS with Ubuntu Server 22.04.

I created all directories needed in the guide, and the only file I modified was the inventory/hosts file - filling in the username/domain for SSH, domain name, contact email and adding the location of the private key for SSH.

The guide didn't note any changes to config.hjson I needed to make, so I copied that file as requested but left it with the default content. I'm thinking if I missed something it's most likely there.

I couldn't access the web UI and with some investigation I found the dessalines/lemmy:0.17.4 (backend) container is continually restarting, apparently because it can't reach the database - sudo docker container logs <id> returns the following:

thread 'main' panicked at 'Error connecting to postgres://lemmy:PasswordRedacted@postgres:5432/lemmy', crates/db_schema/src/utils.rs:161:56

I'm not sure what to do at this point, so I would be very appreciative of any help with this issue.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sounds like your Postgres instance is offline. Any logs from that container?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I just installed using a different OS (Debian) and it works. Not sure why, but I'll take it. Posting from my new instance!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Is there a postgresql docker container running?

[+] aranym 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

suggest you check postgres is running, accepting connections and returning results on the container first:

docker exec -it lemmyname_postgres_1 /bin/bash

assuming you can connect to the docker container and see a prompt, does this command put you at a sql prompt?

psql -U lemmy -d lemmy

if so, let's confirm that a sql command works.

select name from person; (will likely be an empty set if you haven't set up an admin user yet).

Does all this work OK?

[+] aranym 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

it should return an empty set. It looks like the database is running but the lemmy database tables were not installed. Can you get back to the sql prompt and try

\dt

if the database was installed correctly, you should see something like this:

lemmy-# \dt

              List of relations

Schema | Name | Type | Owner

--------+----------------------------+-------+-------

public | __diesel_schema_migrations | table | lemmy

public | activity | table | lemmy . .

. .

public | person | table | lemmy

. . .

can you check that the tables are actually there? My guess is that the tables in the database weren't created. assuming you don't see any tables when you do this, again at the sql prompt, please try

\c lemmy

and see if it connects? if it does, it will say You are now connected to database "lemmy" as user "lemmy".

Let me know what the result of that is and we'll try to figure out what's gone wrong with the database setup because it looks like that's your problem - the database was not populated when it was created.

[+] aranym 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

ok thanks - I'm not very familiar with the lemmy installation process so I will need to check if possibly the schema objects in the database aren't created until the admin user is first set up, which is another possibility, but they definitely aren't there right now - I'll set up a fresh install to check in a few minutes.

Switching gears a bit - when you say you can't access the web UI, can you elaborate on that? The web server should be running. You are going to https://your.url, presumably and then what do you actually see in the browser? It should show an initial setup screen - do you not see anything or is there some kind of error message? When the ansible script runs to create the instance does it throw any errors at all or everything looks happy in the output, including creation of your ssl certs?

[+] aranym 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ok so I ran a clean install and confirmed that the database objects exist. So that's definitely the problem. Your database is munted. An interesting thing happened when I re-ran the playbook - I noticed it didn't rebuild the postgres container. Very suspicious! Let's try blowing it away completely and re-running your script:

docker stop lemmyname_postgres_1

docker rm lemmyname_postgres_1

now re run the ansible playbook and let's see if that works.

[+] aranym 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This alternative installer might be a way around this issue: https://github.com/ubergeek77/Lemmy-Easy-Deploy

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

weird. it's like it failed to install the postgres public schema properly. I am not at all familiar with ansible but I see you can set verbosity. Do you think it would be worth trying that?

According to link below you can preface your playbook command with ANSIBLE_DEBUG=true ANSIBLE_VERBOSITY=4

https://www.shellhacks.com/ansible-enable-debug-increase-verbosity/