Do you have a local device you can try all this on first so you're not wasting money?

I agree the guides aren't great, but they assume you have some experience doing this stuff.

I am willing to try any method you prefer. I've failed at all of them and have no preference. I don't care how I get it working, I just need to see something work. Please, please, please help!!!

It seems like you have the keys configured for putty but not whatever SSH client Ansible uses.

It's going to sound unhelpful, but have you tried running the Ansible stuff from WSL? This is tested on Linux (and macOS probably), but probably not Windows.

You may also want to nuke the box of any previous state if you can. The NGINX errors you're getting are that it expects to find a LetsEncrypt certificate that doesn't exist yet. Typically you need to start NGINX without it first then certbot will generate it and update the NGINX config to use it.

Some people have been using Lemmy-Easy-Deploy, it might be worth a try. It's supposed to be easier and more turnkey. The author is also very open to suggestions and help if the instructions are unclear.

The docs are definitely geared towards people with existing server admin experience at the moment. There's talk on Matrix to improve those.

Please post full logs of what you're running, it will be easier for people to troubleshoot, including everything before. The extra context can be very helpful to know what Ansible did before and give clues as to what it did previously that might fail. That stuff is a moving target, it gets updated frequently and may fail under some unanticipated conditions.

Could you tell us what has failed / did not work on your previous attempts? Also, what setup did you use, what reverse proxy you had in front of Lemmy if any, etc.

So, here's something that might work. I tested it on my local machine, up to Caddy but without HTTPS, but I'm confident it'll work once deployed on a server.

Prerequisites:

• Server with Docker and docker-compose installed
• Ports 80 and 443 open and directed at your server
• A domain name pointing to your server

Setup

First, create a folder and download the following files:

• docker-compose.yml
• lemmy.hjson
• nginx_internal.conf and rename it to nginx.conf

Then, generate passwords for PostgreSQL and your admin user, store them somewhere safe.

Config changes

lemmy.hjson

You'll want to change the admin_username, admin_password and site_name to match your primary user's credentials and the name you want to give your instance.

Then, change hostname to match your domain name: if it is sub.domain.tld then it should read hostname: "sub.domain.tld".

The base config file does not have proper configuration for the database, so you'll have to edit the database field as follows with the password you previously created:

  database: {
    host: postgres
    database: "lemmy"
    user: "lemmy"
    password: "POSTGRES_PWD" # Change for your password
  }

Additionally, if you want to send emails for registration confirmation and password resets, add the following before the closing } and change to match your email provider configuration.

  email: {
      # Hostname and port of the smtp server
      smtp_server: "SMTP_SERVER"
      # Login name for smtp server
      smtp_login: "SMTP_LOGIN"
      # Password to login to the smtp server
      smtp_password: "SMTP_PASSWORD"
      # Address to send emails from, eg "noreply@your-instance.com"
      smtp_from_address: "SMTP_LOGIN"
      # Whether or not smtp connections should use tls. Can be none, tls, or starttls
      tls_type: "starttls"
    }

docker-compose.yml

By default the compose file is meant to build a development version of Lemmy, we will change this by removing the blocks with build and uncomment those with image. Note: think to update the images to 0.18.2 since it fixes some vulnerabilities.

Also, since we will use a reverse proxy and I don't now if your server has a firewall, we should remove the ports blocks which are used to expose the services' ports on the host.

Finally, make sure to change the POSTGRES_PASSWORD field to match the PostgreSQL password you set in lemmy.hjson.

It should look something like that:

version: "3.7"

x-logging: &default-logging
  driver: "json-file"
  options:
    max-size: "50m"
    max-file: "4"

services:
  proxy:
    image: nginx:1-alpine
    volumes:
      - ./nginx.conf:/etc/nginx/nginx.conf:ro,Z
    restart: always
    depends_on:
      - pictrs
      - lemmy-ui
    logging: *default-logging

  lemmy:
    # use "image" to pull down an already compiled lemmy. make sure to comment out "build".
    image: dessalines/lemmy:0.18.2
    # platform: linux/x86_64 # no arm64 support. uncomment platform if using m1.
    # use "build" to build your local lemmy server image for development. make sure to comment out "image".
    # run: docker compose up --build

    # this hostname is used in nginx reverse proxy and also for lemmy ui to connect to the backend, do not change
    hostname: lemmy
    restart: always
    environment:
      - RUST_LOG="warn,lemmy_server=debug,lemmy_api=debug,lemmy_api_common=debug,lemmy_api_crud=debug,lemmy_apub=debug,lemmy_db_schema=debug,lemmy_db_views=debug,lemmy_db_views_actor=debug,lemmy_db_views_moderator=debug,lemmy_routes=debug,lemmy_utils=debug,lemmy_websocket=debug"
      - RUST_BACKTRACE=full
    volumes:
      - ./lemmy.hjson:/config/config.hjson:Z
    depends_on:
      - postgres
      - pictrs
    logging: *default-logging

  lemmy-ui:
    # use "image" to pull down an already compiled lemmy-ui. make sure to comment out "build".
    image: dessalines/lemmy-ui:0.18.2
    # platform: linux/x86_64 # no arm64 support. uncomment platform if using m1.
    # use "build" to build your local lemmy ui image for development. make sure to comment out "image".
    # run: docker compose up --build

    # build:
    #   context: ../../lemmy-ui # assuming lemmy-ui is cloned besides lemmy directory
    #   dockerfile: dev.dockerfile
    environment:
      # this needs to match the hostname defined in the lemmy service
      - LEMMY_UI_LEMMY_INTERNAL_HOST=lemmy:8536
      # set the outside hostname here
      - LEMMY_UI_LEMMY_EXTERNAL_HOST=localhost:1236
      - LEMMY_UI_HTTPS=false
      - LEMMY_UI_DEBUG=true
    depends_on:
      - lemmy
    restart: always
    logging: *default-logging
    init: true

  pictrs:
    image: asonix/pictrs:0.4.0-beta.19
    # this needs to match the pictrs url in lemmy.hjson
    hostname: pictrs
    # we can set options to pictrs like this, here we set max. image size and forced format for conversion
    # entrypoint: /sbin/tini -- /usr/local/bin/pict-rs -p /mnt -m 4 --image-format webp
    environment:
      - PICTRS_OPENTELEMETRY_URL=http://otel:4137
      - PICTRS__API_KEY=API_KEY
      - RUST_LOG=debug
      - RUST_BACKTRACE=full
      - PICTRS__MEDIA__VIDEO_CODEC=vp9
      - PICTRS__MEDIA__GIF__MAX_WIDTH=256
      - PICTRS__MEDIA__GIF__MAX_HEIGHT=256
      - PICTRS__MEDIA__GIF__MAX_AREA=65536
      - PICTRS__MEDIA__GIF__MAX_FRAME_COUNT=400
    user: 991:991
    volumes:
      - ./volumes/pictrs:/mnt:Z
    restart: always
    logging: *default-logging

  postgres:
    image: postgres:15-alpine
    # this needs to match the database host in lemmy.hson
    # Tune your settings via
    # https://pgtune.leopard.in.ua/#/
    # You can use this technique to add them here
    # https://stackoverflow.com/a/30850095/1655478
    hostname: postgres
    command:
      [
        "postgres",
        "-c",
        "session_preload_libraries=auto_explain",
        "-c",
        "auto_explain.log_min_duration=5ms",
        "-c",
        "auto_explain.log_analyze=true",
        "-c",
        "track_activity_query_size=1048576",
      ]
    environment:
      - POSTGRES_USER=lemmy
      - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=password # Change with your password
      - POSTGRES_DB=lemmy
    volumes:
      - ./volumes/postgres:/var/lib/postgresql/data:Z
    restart: always
    logging: *default-logging

Caddy

For the final touch, we are going to setup Caddy, a reverse proxy with HTTPS support out of the box.

First, create a file nammed Caddyfile and write the following in it:

sub.domain.tld {
	reverse_proxy http://proxy:1236
}

Make sure to match your actual domain name.

Finally, update the docker-compose.yml file to add the following at the end (make sure that it's correctly tabulated)

  caddy:
    image: caddy:2.6.4
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "80:80"
      - "443:443"
      - "443:443/udp"
    depends_on:
      - proxy
    volumes:
      - ./Caddyfile:/etc/caddy/Caddyfile:ro
      - caddy_data:/data
      - caddy_config:/config
volumes:
  caddy_data:
  caddy_config:

Launching the instance

Before starting the stack, we have a few things left to do:

• Create the folders for pictrs and postgres to store their data: mkdir -p volumes/postgres volumes/pictrs
• Change the owner of volumes/pictrs: sudo chown -R 991:991 pictrs

Finally, to start everything: docker compose up -d

The only way I could get Lemmy running was to use yunohost

No to demotivate you from trying it, but if you really want to use your instance instead of working on it, may I suggest you try a managed hosting provider?

Communick has managed lemmy instances which are affordable, you don't need to worry about updates or backups and offer a free 14-day trial.

(Obvious disclosure, I run this service)

putty

That's your problem. Putty does keys differently to normal ssh.

ansible

docker

.

So, why can't you install lemmy? I'm going to assume you're using ubuntu. If you are willing to swap to arch (which I think DO offers), I recommend it. Get an AUR helper installed (a bit of hassle, I like trizen) and install lemmy from AUR. You'll need to bump the commit unless you like 0.17.3. I'll be doing that tonight so I can post relevant bits. If not, post errors.

Or just keep doing containers so you can have weird and wonderful errors like no dns.