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[SOLVED] Trying to Set Up a Lemmy Instance and Having Issues

ETA: This is being done on a Raspberry Pi 4 running 64-bit Raspbian using an external SSD as storage.

I am following the instructions here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-docs/blob/4249465e9960cad97245aa03b3ad4c758ff945c7/src/en/administration/install_docker.md

Please note that I have only used docker a few times in the past and have always failed so that could be a contributing factor.

My goal for the moment is just to have the instance on localhost so I can play around with it before deciding if running my own instance is something I have the time for.

Here are the steps I have taken so far and the result:

`WARNING: The Qa variable is not set. Defaulting to a blank string. WARNING: The k variable is not set. Defaulting to a blank string. ERROR: Couldn't connect to Docker daemon at http+docker://localhost - is it running?

If it's at a non-standard location, specify the URL with the DOCKER_HOST environment variable. `

I imagine I'm doing a lot of things wrong. I would be extremely appreciative for any help anybody can provide.

15
15 comments

  • Are you able to post logs from both the lemmy container and the lemmy-ui container? That might shed some light as to which one is failing.

    $ sudo docker logs lemmy
$ sudo docker logs lemmy-ui

    You may need to run sudo docker container ls in order to find the actual container name for the two, as the default docker-compose doesn't specify their names, so they'll get randomly generated.

    (I'm assuming the error you're seeing from docker compose up -d is from lemmy-ui, and something else is failing or preventing the backend from starting, but that's just a guess)

    • It looks like no containers have even been created:

      [redacted]@[redacted]:~/Downloads/lemmy $ sudo docker logs lemmy
Error: No such container: lemmy
[redacted]@[redacted]:~/Downloads/lemmy $ sudo docker container ls
CONTAINER ID   IMAGE     COMMAND   CREATED   STATUS    PORTS     NAMES
[redacted]@[redacted]:~/Downloads/lemmy $

      I guess it didn't get far enough in the process to make them?

      • Hmm. Well I literally just setup a Pi running a Lemmy instance last week. I can walk you through the steps that I took...

        1. Ubuntu Server using https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/. Raspbian should also work with these steps, but I just happened to use Ubuntu Server. So feel free to skip this step.

        2. Install Docker via these instructions: https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/ubuntu/. If you used these steps to install Docker prior, feel free to skip, but if you just did apt-get install... you may need to revisit that page.

        3. created a lemmy folder somewhere on my machine. For the sake of argument, I'm going to assume /docker/lemmy for now.

        3a) Create the volumes and pictrs folders and chown them as described in original documentation: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/administration/install_docker.html

        1. Copy the docker-compose.yml file as described in the documentation as well as the lemmy.hjson. I placed the docker-compose in /docker and the lemmy.hjson in /docker/lemmy.

        2. Edit the docker-compose.yml so that you use the latest pre-build images instead of building from source. To do that you'll want to remove the lines that look like this:

        build:
  context: ../
  dockerfile: docker/Dockerfile

        and instead replace them with:

        image: dessalines/lemmy:<tag>

        but before we do that we need to determine the latest tags that are available to the Pi. You can look here: https://hub.docker.com/r/dessalines/lemmy/tags and here: https://hub.docker.com/r/dessalines/lemmy-ui/tags. For the Pi though the latest versions available are: 0.17.3-linux-arm64 for both the backend and the UI.

        1. Now you should be able to edit the lemmy.hjson / docker-compose and the nginx.conf files to match your environment (i.e. set the passwords, site-name, etc...).

        P.S. I did lookup the error you got and it seems to be related to Nginx. So if above steps don't work, you may need to paste your nginx.conf file.

  • Does your database password contain $Qa and/or $k? It'll interpret those as environment variables if not escaped properly.

    The docker daemon not running is a bit weird, usually docker-compose shouldn't be trying to connect to the daemon via http, are you using sudo?

    • You're a genius! I always generate my passwords with Keepass and forgot to unmark the characters setting. Going to give that a try now. Thank you!

    • Also on the second part I didn't realize I had to use sudo (yeah as I mentioned I am terrible with docker). Fixing the db pswd and using sudo has made it all start! Thank you again!

15 comments