Does anyone run their own Lemmy instance on a pi? How was the process of setting it up? Were there any pitfalls? How is performance?
[Edit] So a lot of testing around. Compiling from scratch, etc, etc…
So far i have tried
- installing lemmy using rootless docker (on 0.17.3)
- compiling the image 0.18 docker image as arm
rootless docker did not work well for me. lots of systemd issues and i gave up after running into a lot of issues. I tried rootless docker for security reasons. minimal permissions, etc.
When trying to compile the latest lemmy image in arm, i ran into issues with muslrust not having an arm version. It might be worth investigating rewriting the docker file from 0.17.3 to work with 0.18.0 but i haven’t investigated that fully yet! I tried compiling the latest image because i wanted to be able to use the latest features
At the moment, I’m trying to set lemmy to run under bare metal. Im currently attempting to compile lemmy under arm. If that works, i’ll start setting up .service files to start up lemmy and pictrs.
I don’t think there should be any problems, lemmy is a fairly lightweight web application, it’s compiled so no big overhead of some runtime like ruby in case of mastodon. I haven’t tried it on a raspberry Pi, but on my server the load is always just around 0.1
The only bottleneck I could think of was Postgres, but I’ve been running postgres on raspberry pies without any problems before too.
Im looking at setting up a lemmy instance on a rpi3 with cloudflared tunnel! I’m curious to see if anyone else has done this and how it was.
Edit: I’ll give it a whirl and hopefully post an update from my new instance later!
I was able to get it setup, main things to watch out for:
- Don’t use the provided docker compose file. Or more precisely don’t build from source and lookup the correct image tag on docker hub first.
- The documentation was a bit confusing. This isn’t really specific for the Pi but since I was creating a compose file from scratch some of the steps listed didn’t quite explain all of the details.
I only used it for testing purposes, but performance was fine (on a Pi4 4gb). Note I only ever had one user.
As I only want to use it for myself as jump-off point (and to mess around a tad) I’m fine with performance on an RPi4 (have the 8 GB version), but I’m struggling to get it next to the rest in my Debian install on it.
Local install fails as I need imagemagick 7 (Debian still had 6.9), and it refuses to compile with imei method. (that script wants to use /usr/local/bin/identify which I think it needs to install itself (part of imagemagick) and the compose file I couldn’t get to work with an external (already hosted) postgres.
Any tips? I’m totally new with docker and ansible.
Not yet, but I’m planning to. And I don’t think there will be any “pitfalls” at all other than your microsd dying in a couple of months rather than years due to it getting hammered constantly by API requests, etc.
You could plug in a USB SSD or HDD and make sure the DB and other regularly written data goes there. That would pretty much remove the problem.
I would wonder how well it would perform. The limited memory and cpu power surely would make database access not great under even moderate load.
You are right – I completely forgot about those, thanks.
I would wonder how well it would perform.
Something between “usable” to “a complete nightmare” – depending of how popular the lemmy instance is. Which would scare new users away, leaving it as a “cool kids only” thing. Then again, theres the fact that the power draw is little to none, which is very important regarding most self-hosting stuff – “can’t use it if I can’t maintain it”.
What user cap would a pi have running an instance?
Are you asking me what i plan to set the cap to? I guess just me. I cant see anyone else wanting to run off a pi from my house and there are so many other instances to join.
I’m a newbie here but what would be the benefit of running an instance just for yourself?
The ability to host your own data - both for privacy, and insurance that the instance you host your account in won’t suddenly disappear.
No, I meant what is the user limit based on the power of the raspberry pi tech specs.
Basically the limit would be the speed of the database and the drive it runs on. If you connect a SATA SSD via usb3 it shouldn’t be too bad. Can’t tell you exact figures but a few hundred users is probably ok if you don’t expect the site to be super responsive.
