this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
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This is why I'm happy to be on my own private instance and part of what really turned me on to Lemmy. It's trivial to spin up your own instance if you're technically inclined. You have complete control over what you see and aren't subject to some power hungry admin on some server like Beehaw. That's what makes the fediverse so great imo
I was trying to set up my own 0.17.4 instance for a week. I have used docker professionally. 0.17.4 wasn't trivial to set up. The instructions were full of errors and omissions. I basically had to rewrite the whole docker-compose.yml myself.
Of course, right when I was at the finish line, they released 0.18.0 and rewrote the instructions, and now it gets you 90% of the way right out of the box. There was still one omission to pull an nginx config file, and then you need to get your own certificate and add it to that config file (or use a reverse proxy, but I have no need for that at the moment).
At least it's much easier than it was 3 days ago.
If I didn't already have a bunch of shit running in containers that I don't want to risk messing up, I would have looked into using their Ansible instructions. But I really don't like running scripts on my server (especially as root!) unless I know everything that it's doing.
Trivial probably wasn't the best choice of word. I will say the effort was worth it
Sounds painful. Hopefully, you embraced the FOSS mindset and contributed the missing 10% to the docs.
I planned to, but I'm not even sure how. The docs aren't just a file in the GitHub that I can edit.
Aren't they? I didn't check but the docs for my open source stuff are just markdown in the same repository that gets built on release.
Edit: found them
Thanks, I'll give this an update today.
Updated the docs. The change got merged in this morning.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-docs/pull/236/commits/6222f9bf042d7e5421792ee3b80ff24add7e7d20
Nice job :D
How hard would you say it is for a non-programmer to set up their own instance?
Now that most of the issues are resolved, I would say none of it is really an issue you would need to be a programmer to resolve. More that you would need to have experience setting up websites.
I also set mine up manually. There are a half a dozen or so different scripts that will set it up for you, including an official one here. I generally don't feel comfortable running scripts on my server, so I avoid this if possible. But if you don't have anything else on your server that you're afraid it will fuck up, this is probably the easiest way to do it. You're basically installing one command line program, on your laptop, then running the script. You'll just need WSL2 on your laptop, be comfortable with CLI, and know how to git clone a repository. All that stuff can be easily googled.