Lemmy - Ansible role

This role covers deployment, configuration and software updates of Lemmy. This role is released under MIT Licence and we give no warranty for this piece of software. Currently supported OS - Debian.

You can deploy test instance using Vagrantfile attached to the role.

However, to have this role working with Vagrant, you have to get a self-signed certificate. If you don't want it, simply change the var selfsigned from true to false.

Then simply: vagrant up

ansible-playbook -b Playbooks/lemmy.yml

Add 192.168.33.25 lemmy.example.lan to /etc/hosts Then you can access lemmy from your computer on https://lemmy.example.lan

Playbook

The playbook includes postgresql, nginx and node roles and deploys entire stack needed to run lemmy. Additional roles are also available in the Ansible roles repos in git.

Information

• As backend, frontend, pict-rs and imagemagick are built, the server needs some GB for disk (at least 12GB) and for memory (at least 2GB, probable better with 4GB).
• It also means that on first run, it takes some time...
• As pict-rs needs imagemagick 7.x but Debian version is 6.9, this role installs imagemagick using the IMEI (ImageMagick Easy Install) script (See https://git.asonix.dog/asonix/pict-rs/src/branch/main/docs/ubuntu-and-debian.md and https://github.com/SoftCreatR/imei)

Tags

You can use several tags when you deploy:

• backend: to deploy just backend
• ui: to deploy just ui
• config: to deploy just config
• pictrs: to deploy pictrs and imagemagick
• imagemagick: to deploy just imagemagick
• purge: to purge the deps built files of pictrs and backend

CHANGELOG

• 23.03.2024 - Stop lemmy service before updating
• 24.12.2023 - Add purge task
• 02.12.2023 - Role update
• 12.11.2022 - Role creation

Still need to be fixed or done:

pict-rs version

Problem building pict-rs, the only version that works is the v0.5.0-beta.2. That means that you can now build backend with pict-rs emebeded cargo build --release --features embed-pictrs. This could be added once this is possible.

In config.hjson:

cache_external_link_previews: true and upload_timeout: 30 are commented out coz the server would not start with those enabled. I don't understand why.

In lemmy.service

Environment=LEMMY_CONFIG_LOCATION doesn't work, so I had to set config in config/config.hjson as default required. See https://join-lemmy.org/docs/administration/configuration.html

Theming

See https://join-lemmy.org/docs/administration/theming.html