How do I create my own Lemmy Serve? (midwest.social)

submitted 1 year ago by JCreazy@midwest.social to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world

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I've searched and it seems that information is limited. I have a mini PC in my office not doing anything and would like to make it into a proper Lemmy server. It seems a bit involved and while I'm technically inclined it's over my head. I already have a domain but I have absolutely no idea where to go from here.

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[-] idle@158436977.xyz 12 points 1 year ago

If you are not familiar with docker, I suggest you learn it. Then follow this guide.

https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/administration/install_docker.html

If you are planning on hosting from home I highly suggest that you use something like cloudflare tunnels. You are going to be advertising your instance to the fediverse, so you do not want your home ip exposed.

Use this to setup the cloudflare tunnel into a reverse proxy, then point the reverse proxy to you lemmy instance.

https://www.linuxserver.io/blog/zero-trust-hosting-and-reverse-proxy-via-cloudflare-swag-and-authelia

[-] JCreazy@midwest.social 1 points 1 year ago

The only experience that I've had with docker is when I had it installed on my Synology NAS and was trying to run a Home Assistant container. I could not get it to work at all so instead I have a mini PC dedicated to just Home Assistant. I will read into cloudfare and revese proxy. Thanks for the info.

[-] idle@158436977.xyz 2 points 1 year ago

I would keep trying, once you get over the hump it's a total game changer.

[-] Falmarri@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

If you don't have your home assistant set up as accessible from the Internet, there's a plugin that uses cloudflare tunnels for that.

https://community.home-assistant.io/t/new-add-on-cloudflared/361637/10

[-] drphungky@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Proxy and/or reverse proxy is where my understanding of pipes and tubes gets pretty scant. Is that cloudflare link similar to what I feel like I normally see set up with nginx? I want to eventually set it up so my server is accessible from outside my home network (watching Plex would be pretty neat while on the road in the RV), and I feel like a test Lemmy server would be good practice.

[-] idle@158436977.xyz 3 points 1 year ago

Is it normal practice? Maybe 50/50. A lot of self holsters will tell you to use a cloudflare tunnel no matter what. It does help weed out a lot of bots. If you open a port and look at the access log in nginx, you will see thousands of attempts daily. It's basically bots constantly scanning the ipv4 range fishing for common vulnerabilies. I cloudflare will filter a lot of that out.

Personally I use cloudflare, but only for Lemmy. My other hosted applications don't use it, it's too complicated (and cloudflare can see your data). I use it for Lemmy to mask my ip address.

For plex, I would just allows Plex to open port 32400 and use their setup. Plus, cloudflare could ban you for streaming through their tunnel. It violated their TOS.

[-] drphungky@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

I have found Plex's solution to be kind of unreliable but that's good info, thanks. I'll look into it all one of these days.

[-] Wander@yiffit.net 4 points 1 year ago

Google the lemmy-ansible repository. You'll need to install Linux on your PC first.

[-] howdy@thesimplecorner.org 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Or setup wsl. That's what I used to deploy Ansible

[-] JCreazy@midwest.social 1 points 1 year ago

I've read about ansible, I just have no idea what it is or how it works. I've already got Ubuntu running on my computer.

[-] Wander@yiffit.net 1 points 1 year ago

It follows instructions and replicates them automatically. AKA auto-install.

[-] NABDad@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

For a second, I thought you were giving some "Silence of the Lambs" instructions there.

It follows instructions or else it gets the hose again...

[-] longshaden@beehaw.org 0 points 1 year ago

your first hurdle is installing a lemmy server locally. this is a mission on it's own, and I can be of zero assistance here.

your second hurdle is enabling port forwarding and making that server accessible from the internet. I'm going to assume you know how to do the 2nd. port foward dot com if you don't.

your third hurdle will be setting up dynamic dns. again, lots of choices here, and different tiers of service/support. I'm assuming this is enough to point you in the right direction, and your home router likely has built in support for a few providers.

I recommend tackling these hurdles in order, but they don't have to be done in order.

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