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A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

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In over my head (lemm.ee)

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

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Today I decided to get an inexpensive custom domain from Namecheap and try self-hosting Lemmy. A few bucks later I was thinking, "Hey, this is going to be cake."

I'd read some of the warnings about Oracle Cloud free tier, but figured I'd still give it a shot for hosting. I found a simple how-to for quickly getting an Ubuntu instance spun up with Docker and Portainer. A few minutes later I'm thinking, "This is so easy!"

Then I try to access Portainer using HTTPS and see my first "Your connection is not private," warning. "No worries," I think. "Advanced>Proceed. I'm in."

So I run Lemmy Easy Deploy. "The lights are green, the trap is clean! Boom. Here we go!"

Nothing.

Ports seem to be open on Oracle, but no Lemmy at either 80 or 443.

"Maybe Lemmy is more particular about SSL certificates and such?" I think, for the first time getting worried.

"Err, I think that if I change my nameserver to Cloudflare I can destroy my Lemmy containers, re-run Lemmy Easy Deploy with a Cloudflare API token, and maybe fix it?

Four hours later, after repeatedly starting over, clearing my browser cache every 5 minutes, switching back and forth between nameservers, even deleting the whole Oracle Cloud VM and starting from scratch, I realize that an HTTP connection to port 443 is returning "Client sent an HTTP request to an HTTPS server."

"Were you there before, message?" I wonder.

Lemmy friends, can you help me? Or am I better off just deleting the VM and giving up the whole idea?

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

Yes, the VM is Ubuntu 22.04.

Edit: Replied out of context. Fixed.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Then it should work with this: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/administration/install_docker.html

Here are the commands, basically:

Installing docker

From this doc: https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/ubuntu/

for pkg in docker.io docker-doc docker-compose podman-docker containerd runc; do sudo apt-get remove $pkg; done
apt-get update
apt-get install ca-certificates curl gnupg
install -m 0755 -d /etc/apt/keyrings
curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg
chmod a+r /etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg
echo "deb [arch="$(dpkg --print-architecture)" signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu "$(. /etc/os-release && echo "$VERSION_CODENAME")" stable" | tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list > /dev/null
apt-get update
apt-get install docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io docker-buildx-plugin docker-compose-plugin docker-compose

This series of commands installed an official docker repository in your system so docker itself is always up-to-date, Ubuntu gets updates like this kinda slowly.

Installing Lemmy

From this doc: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/administration/install_docker.html

mkdir /opt/lemmy
cd /opt/lemmy
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ansible/main/templates/docker-compose.yml
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ansible/main/examples/config.hjson -O lemmy.hjson
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ansible/main/templates/nginx_internal.conf
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ansible/main/examples/customPostgresql.conf
Edit all the downloaded files (for example using nano) and change everything that starts with {{ and ends with }}
mkdir -p volumes/pictrs
chown -R 991:991 volumes/pictrs
docker-compose up -d

Installing webserver

I chose Caddy, you can choose a different one but then you'll have to check on your own.

From this guide: https://caddyserver.com/docs/install#debian-ubuntu-raspbian

apt install -y debian-keyring debian-archive-keyring apt-transport-https
curl -1sLf 'https://dl.cloudsmith.io/public/caddy/stable/gpg.key' | gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/caddy-stable-archive-keyring.gpg
curl -1sLf 'https://dl.cloudsmith.io/public/caddy/stable/debian.deb.txt' | tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/caddy-stable.list
apt update
apt install caddy
Edit the file /etc/caddy/Caddyfile (for example using nano /etc/caddy/Caddyfile)
Paste this content (replace domain.tld with your Lemmy instance domain and the 1236 with the port you have configured in the docker-compose.yml file for {{ lemmy_port }}):

domain.tld {
        @http {
                protocol http
        }
        redir @http https://{host}{uri}
        reverse_proxy localhost:1236
}

Hope I haven't forgotten anything, feel free to ask.

Edit: After all the commands, restart caddy with service caddy restart.