In the past few days, I've seen a number of people having trouble getting Lemmy set up on their own servers. That motivated me to create Lemmy-Easy-Deploy, a dead-simple solution to deploying Lemmy using Docker Compose under the hood.
To accommodate people new to Docker or self hosting, I've made it as simple as I possibly could. Edit the config file to specify your domain, then run the script. That's it! No manual configuration is needed. Your self hosted Lemmy instance will be up and running in about a minute or less. Everything is taken care of for you. Random passwords are created for Lemmy's microservices, and HTTPS is handled automatically by Caddy.
Updates are automatic too! Run the script again to detect and deploy updates to Lemmy automatically.
If you are an advanced user, plenty of config options are available. You can set this to compile Lemmy from source if you want, which is useful for trying out Release Candidate versions. You can also specify a Cloudflare API token, and if you do, HTTPS certificates will use the DNS challenge instead. This is helpful for Cloudflare proxy users, who can have issues with HTTPS certificates sometimes.
Does your user have permission to use Docker? You could try running the script as root and seeing if that helps?
Is there any other info about your system that you can provide? For example, are you using a non-standard OCI runtime, such as podman? I've added detection for podman-compose in the script, but I haven't tested it yet. If you're using something like that, you'll need to ensure all the permissions are set up correctly.
From a quick Google search, it looks like there may have been a bug in the Docker engine a few months ago that might cause this. If possible, please update your Docker engine.
If the issue still occurs, unfortunately this is a core Docker engine/Docker Compose issue, and outside of my ability to fix :(
Docker Compose is just a frontend script for Docker, it doesn't provide the engine. Is it possible you don't have Docker itself installed? I will add an additional check to my script to guide users into making sure Docker is installed.
Regardless of if you have Docker installed or not, if you are on Ubuntu, the Ubuntu version of Docker is usually several versions out of date. I recommend following this guide to help you uninstall everything Docker related from your system, then reinstalling the most stable and up to date version of Docker.
After doing this, reboot your server, then try again. Make sure you can run:
docker run hello-world
If that errors too, then unfortunately there is not a lot I can do to help you. But hopefully reinstalling from the official Docker sources works for you.
If you aren't on Ubuntu, you can get specific instructions for different distributions directly on this page:
For the guide you're following, you should be sure to follow the "Uninstall old versions" part, then proceed with the rest of the commands on the page.
EDIT: I've updated the script to add some additional checks and messages that may help avoid this for future users!