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.
Try it out and let me know what you think!
Unfortunately, Lemmy Easy Deploy isn’t well suited for running behind a reverse proxy. It is a complete “do everything for me,” and I don’t have a good way to support people running a webserver already. I’ve pushed an update a few minutes ago, so you can try playing with the ports and maybe turning off Caddy’s TLS (so that certificates are managed by your webserver instead of the one in LED), but I’m sorry to say you’re on your own in that case :(
Lemmy can basically run on a potato. Any VPS will do, but the main metric you’ll want to keep track of is disk space. Any $5/month instance will be fine.
I am a moderate-to-heavy user of Lemmy, and I go through about 700MB of new data per day. If you federate with less communities than me, this may be less for you. At my current rate of storage, I can go for about a month and a half before I have to worry about storage space.
After that, I’m thinking about clearing my thumbnail cache, and seeing if Lemmy has some way to prune old data. I haven’t been using Lemmy long enough to know what to do to clean things up, but if I figure out something clever in a month or two, I’ll share what I learn.
EDIT: Turns out ~90% of my Lemmy data is just for debugging and not needed:
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3103#issuecomment-1631643416