Hello. As I’ve mentioned on my presentation post, I’m planning to host an instance of LemmyBB, and although I won’t start the actual installation until all the holidays have ended, I’m already in the planning stage, and many questions are already popping out :

  1. I would have preferred to not use docker (i hate it), but seeing that the manual installation of the Lemmy backend is heavily discouraged, I’ll get used to the idea. But as I don’t have many experience using docker, some questions arise as I read the installation manual:
  • “mkdir /srv/lemmybb” Does this implies that all the data inside the docker image will be stored on this folder? I always install Linux with separate system/data partitions, so I need to know this. I’m ok with using the /srv folder.
  • Is the database inside the docker image? Can it be configured to use any PostreSQL? I may install more services in this server, and I don’t like the idea of having many databases engines running on it, I’ll prefer only one centralized DB.

  1. If I’m understanding correctly, the docker image exposes the service on http://127.0.0.1:8701/, and then is reverse-proxied to the outside world. Can this reverse proxy be carried with Apache? I’ve never used nginx, however I have lots of experience with Apache, including reverse proxies, so I would prefer to stick with what I know. I can build a configuration for it based on the config file for nginx, no problem on this, but I need to know if the actual software will tolerate this or fail spectacularly

  2. System and bandwidth requirements? I’ll be using a bare metal server, and industrial PC with an Atom D510, 4GB of ram and 128 GB of total disk space. The connection is going to be my home connection, trough my home router

Thanks for the help.

  • @nutomic@fedibb.ml
    1•1 year ago

    You dont need to worry so much about the warning regarding manual installation. You can always ask for help here, just not on Github which is generally the wrong place for that.

    If you install with Docker in /srv/lemmybb, then all data will be stored in the volumes/ subfolder of that path. But you can also choose any different path for installation. If you install with docker-compose, using the db from other services might be tricky, not sure how it would work.

    Apache should work just fine, however I am not aware of any existing Lemmy config for it, so you would have to write it yourself based on the nginx config.

    The hardware requirements are extremely low, as everything is written in Rust. The language is extremely efficient, and as Lemmy doesnt do anything complex beyond text processing and some cryptographic signatures for federation, even the slowest possible device should easily handle hundreds or thousands of users.