Thanks for the reply! This seems like a great option. I am going to look more closely at this over the weekend. I want to make sure I understand what it is doing before I run it and potentially mess up some other configuration I have on my server (have done this in the recent past.......)

The instructions didn't tell me I needed to. I don't know how someone is supposed to know that. I would have expected the instructions to at very least tell me I needed to make that and what the file name should be. But I did eventually figure it out. I had to search their github page to find the example one, then modify it for https

Oh, that was my bad. I replaced my actual path with because my name is in the path (home directory). Sorry, I definitely should have clarified that.

I got it going... the main problem was that the ports for the proxy container were defined in a confusing way. Rather, the port definition should be symmetrical (e.g. 1236:1236) and not conflated with the lemmy server port (8536). Then, the nginx_internal.conf should be set to listen on 1236 only.

The only thing I changed from the nginx_internal.conf that is here is that I added ssl. But with no changes (aside from the required changes described in the instructions) to this file or docker-compose.yml, you should be able to access it using curl http://localhost:8536. I am not using a reverse proxy, as I am not hosting anything other webservers on my server at the moment, so I actually changed the exposed port in docker-compose.yml to map 443 to 8536 so I can serve https on the default port directly from the nginx container. Oh, and I had to add a mounted volume to the nginx container in docker-compose.yml for my ssl certificates for https.

Here's what I added:

docker-compose.yml: (under services -> proxy -> volumes) - /path/to/ssl/certs/on/host/:/path/to/ssl/certs/in/container/ (under service -> proxy -> ports) - "443:8536"

nginx_internal.conf: (under http -> server)

        ssl_certificate /path/to/ssl/certs/in/container/fullchain.pem;
        ssl_certificate_key /path/to/ssl/certs/in/container/privkey.pem;
        ssl_protocols TLSv1.3;
        ssl_ciphers HIGH:!aNULL:!MD5; # Full disclosure, I'm not 100% if this is the best option to put here

        # this is the port inside docker, not the public one yet
        listen 1236;
        listen 8536 ssl; # I had to add "ssl" here to serve https
        # change if needed, this is facing the public web
        server_name yourdomain.tld;

If you wanted to skip https for now and just get it up, replace 443 with 80, and don't make any changes to nginx_internal.conf.

So, from what I have gathered, the lemmy-ui conatiner contains the html/js, and the lemmy container is the backend. Not 100% sure on that, but I believe that's what it is. When trying to set up 0.17.4, I was able to access the UI by adding the lemmy-ui container to the lemmyexternalproxy network and mapping port 0.0.0.0:80 to lemmy-ui:1234.

Ports aren't usually exposed from the container directly. All ports are shared between containers on the lemmyinternal network. Only the nginx container is on the lemmyexternalproxy network, which is the one that can map ports to the host. So basically, your lemmy-ui container is exposing port 1234 to the nginx container through the lemmyinternal network, and nginx container is mapping that port on the lemmyinternal network to the lemmyexternalproxy on port 8536, and then docker is mapping port 8536 from the nginx container to 8536 (or whatever port you set it to. In my case, 443) on 0.0.0.0 (the host and the world).

I hope that I worded that last part in a way that makes sense 😅.