Administration

Information for Lemmy instance admins, and those who want to run a server.

If you have any problems in the installation, you can ask for help in !lemmy_support or Matrix. Do not open Github issues for support.

Install

Official/Supported methods

Lemmy has two primary installation methods:

• Manually with Docker
• Automated with Ansible

We recommend using Ansible, because it simplifies the installation and also makes updating easier.

Lemmy uses roughly 150 MB of RAM in the default Docker installation. CPU usage is negligible.

Managed Hostings

• Elestio
• K&T Host

Other installation methods

⚠️ Under your own risk.

In some cases, it might be necessary to use different installation methods.

• From Scratch
• YunoHost (source code)
• On Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• Nomad (see this external repo for examples)

You could use any other reverse proxy

An Example Caddy configuration.

Lemmy components

Lemmy-ui

Lemmy-ui is the main frontend for Lemmy. It consists of an expressjs based server-side process (necessary for SSR) and client code which run in the browser. It does not use a lot of resources and will happily run on quite low powered servers.

Lemmy_server

Lemmy_server is the backend process, which handles:

• Incoming HTTP requests (both from Lemmy clients and incoming federation from other servers)
• Outgoing federation
• Scheduled tasks (most notably, constant hot rank calculations, which keep the front page fresh)

Pict-rs

Pict-rs is a service which does image processing. It handles user-uploaded images as well as downloading thumbnails for external images.