[SOLVED] Lemmy "server error" when pict-rs is not running

There are a few reasons why pict-rs might not be running, upgrades being one of them. At the moment the whole of lemmy UI will crash and burn if it cannot load a site icon. Yes, that little thing. Here's the github issue.

To work around this I have set the icon and banner (might as well since we're working on this) to be loaded from a local file rather than nginx.

Here's a snippet of nginx config from the server block:

location /static-img/ {
      alias /srv/lemmy/lemmy.cafe/static-img/;

      # Rate limit
      limit_req zone=lemmy.cafe_ratelimit burst=30 nodelay;

      # Asset cache defined in /etc/nginx/conf.d/static-asset-cache.conf
      proxy_cache lemmy_cache;
    }

I have also included the rate limitting and cache config, but it is not, strictly speaking, necessary.

The somewhat important bit here is the location - I've tried using static, but that is already used by lemmy itself, and as such breaks the UI. Hence the static-img.

I have downloaded the icon and banner from the URLs saved in the database (assuming your instance id in site is, in fact, 1):

SELECT id, icon, banner FROM site WHERE id = 1;
 id |                     icon                     |                     banner
----+----------------------------------------------+------------------------------------------------
  1 | https://lemmy.cafe/pictrs/image/43256175-2cc1-4598-a4b8-2575430ab253.webp | https://lemmy.cafe/pictrs/image/c982358f-6a51-4eb6-bf0e-7a07a756e600.webp
(1 row)

I have then saved those files in /srv/lemmy/lemmy.cafe/static-img/ as site-icon.webp and site-banner.webp. Changed the ownership to that of nginx (www-data in debian universe, http and httpd in others.

I have then updated the site table to point to the new location for icon and banner:

UPDATE site SET icon = 'https://lemmy.cafe/static-img/site-icon.webp' WHERE id = 1;
UPDATE site SET banner = 'https://lemmy.cafe/static-img/site-banner.webp' WHERE id = 1;

Confirm it got applied:

SELECT id, icon, banner FROM site WHERE id = 1;
 id |                     icon                     |                     banner
----+----------------------------------------------+------------------------------------------------
  1 | https://lemmy.cafe/static-img/site-icon.webp | https://lemmy.cafe/static-img/site-banner.webp
(1 row)

That's it! You can now reload your nginx server (nginx -s reload) to apply the new path!