So I’ve been scratching my head for two days trying to get my own lemmy server up and running.
I have limited server hosting experience but I used to design html websites back in high school through wordpress and was able to successfully set up my own mastadon instance so I’m pretty decent at following instructions, but what keeps tripping me up is ansible and how the heck it works.
The instructions (https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ansible) are telling me to install ansible on my local machine using python3. On my windows machine I installed ansible using python but when i type the ansible command into terminal it gives me no command found. Is linux required as a host machine?
I have an account over at digitalocean and I’m willing to host my own ubuntu machine over there to get my instance running but I cannot for the life of me figure out how ansible is supposed to set up a server on my windows machine. ANY help would be GREATLY appreciated… I’m tearing my hair out and feel incredibly stupid right now :D
The way I did it was to setup WSL and installed Ansible there then used the lemmy ansible script pointing to my lemmy instance VM
Not sure how ansible works on Windows but you could use Windows Subsystem for Linux, install ansible on that and then off you go.
Ansible runs on your local machine, but it executes the setup on your (Linux) server remotely via SSH. I’d definitely recommend the Ansible setup, it was the easiest I tried. Are you able to SSH into your server already?
Stop what you are doing and use https://github.com/ubergeek77/Lemmy-Easy-Deploy
It is super easy this way.
If you’re running python on windows then you need to make sure you’re environment variables are updated or else the commands the instructions tells you to put into cmd will do nothing because the path to the application isn’t defined.
After a looooong day of trial and error and basically learning all of this from scratch, I am happy to say I have finally gotten my own instance up and running!
HUGE credits goes to @ubergeek77@lemmy.ubergeek77.chat for creating a script to install Lemmy in just a few simply commands. Definitely reccomend checking out his work if you’re brand new to all of this: https://lemmy.world/post/249889
Although I ended up taking the “easy way out”, I do want to take a moment to thank all of you for taking the time to comment and contribute time to help me sort out this problem. This is such a warm and welcoming communtiy and I really appreciate it. Cheers from SoCal!
Amazing!!! I’m so glad to hear I was able to help you get things set up! You’re my first success story, good to know it’s actually working for people!
Welcome to the self-hosted Fediverse!
I just set one up using docker. Went surprisingly smoothly.
Well the server to run lemmy must be at least from that repo debian based. (Ubuntu or debian). Per the requirements.
Anisvle prolly could run on windows. Never tested.
Install wsl for windows Ubuntu default.(can install wsl in PowerShell).
Install Ansible in wsl, create ssh keys to your VPS, follow those instructions.
On my Ubuntu server I did literally nothing but the ssh key generation.
I think this is one of the more sensible answers here. If your workstation is windows, then utilize WSL for ansible and deploy onto a ubuntu or debian host (I’m assuming it works fine on debian, I used ubuntu). You might run into some issues with ansible dependencies as the readme doesn’t seem to cover everything from what i remember, but once ansible works and has the correct configs, deployment is super easy.
Yeah Ansible I had to set the path variable and did the ssh key generation. Other than that my lemmy was up and running in like 10 minutes all automated. You can go back and change the config by rebuilding the yaml. It’s not bad at all.
I ran into some dependency issues(needed to install ansible-collection-community-docker on my fedora workstation), but after that it ran fine and installed everything first run. I made some adjustments to the inventory config afterwards, but aside from that it just worked.
sadly, none of these is worth implementing. Remember, Windows is designed to break. MS has millions of tiny levers to flick, and they don’t care if their mindless flicking fucks up your work. Worse of all, the law protects them from flicking to destroy you out of spite. Best thing to do is just use linux. Or design our own OS. Since Linux itself is slowly collapsing under the weight of MS bullshit. And god forbid that shithole IOS.
If you aren’t attached to Ansible, I suggest using Docker to host Lemmy. I found it’s instructions, using Docker Compose, to be quite straight forward.
My other 2 cents is that hosting on Windows isn’t worth the hassle and there will be a lot less to debug on Ubuntu if you’re already comfortable with it.
