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My own Lemmy self-host guide (lemmy.myspamtrap.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Just a basic guide on how I implemented Lemmy and the issues I ran into

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

Hey, great write-up, thanks for sharing!

I find it interesting how you had to declare a DNS server for federation to work. I played a bit with Docker Lemmy but I ran into weird Docker networking issues when trying to get it to talk to my mail server, which is in another docker container on a seperate VM. I just couldn't get them to talk to each other!

I ended up building Lemmy from scratch, which was painful given the state of documentation, but somehow more workable than that Docker quirk I encountered. It's still a mistery to me how to solve that one, though it's probably just my lack of experience with Docker, I generally prefer setting things up the old fashioned way.

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

Thank you.

I'm very much just learning this afternoon both how to run and instance, and how to use it.

From the logs, I think what was happening is that a request would come in from a federated instance which basically says "Hi, I'm from server X, please can we do federate stuff", then the lemmy server tries to resolve the hostname X so it can say hi back. If DNS isn't working that message back fails and then the whole federation bit fails.

Adding DNS explicitly resolves that.

Googling docker and DNS shows this isn't just me, and I've run into this before.

If you're running different docker instances on different VMs, then unless you put them into a swarm explicitly, you need to allow each out to the local network and to talk to each other. You'd need to fix the firewalls and DNS on both because they won't share a docker network. AFAIK, anyway. I'm not a docker expert.

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

I find Docker a mixed bag, it vastly simplifies some things, but then it complicates others.

Yes the bit that gets me is having the whole Docker networking layer with its own firewalls and rules, on top of host networking. Whatever was happening, Lemmy was not hitting the host or router firewalls at all. So maybe it was a Docker permissions thing, I really don't know.

Then you have to worry about performance and how Docker handles assigned resources, this post was very interesting in this respect: https://lemmy.world/post/920294 (the bit on solutions).

Then again, it's so much more straightforward to deploy Lemmy with Docker, none of this is a real problem unless you're a big/public instance.

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

I suspect that's less a Docker issue, and more to do with the code itself. Any code that's synchonous or serial in nature (eg. including a lot of web-calls to remote resources like federated sites) is going to max out due to IO or network latency long before saturating CPU, and becomes a natural target for horizontal scaling.

I'd be surprised if that's a pure Docker thing vs just Lemmy code in general. But, I don't have sufficient hardware to test on to prove that out.

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

That makes sense, I think you may be on the money there.

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

I’m setting up my second pc as a server and going to give this a shot and see how it runs. Thanks for the write up!

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

That's an awesome project! I love re-purposing computers for self-hosted stuff.

Let us know how you go, as @[email protected] says, your setup will probably be different than his or mine, but I'm also happy to help if I can.

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

There are definitely a bunch of things I'm doing because I have them already setup for other services.

Getting HTTPS to work, for example, was pretty easy because I already have ACME running for my domains, so can just reference existing certs.

Similarly, I have the domain and DNS already running, so don't need to handle setting it up, or messing with the firewall or router for that piece.

But, happy to help if I can.