I was looking into the prospect of deploying an instance of Lemmy myself. Being an ULTRA nix fanboi (and a Docker-hater), I was immediately struck by how much the process still depends on (and, IMO, is being held hostage by) Docker containers.

Can we (or at least someone more capable and with more free time than I) help the Lemmy community by harnessing the power of nix and flakes to create declarative, reproducible Lemmy scratch-built instance deployment?

I suspect it would be exceptionally easy for some of you out there. If you are a flakes power-user, just think of how much this could help the community (and perhaps awaken a few people to the power of flakes).

ps. if this already exists, please point me in the right direction.

  • MariusEnglish
    2•1 year ago

    It is possible to deploy a lemmy server via a NixOS option. It’s under services.lemmy, see https://search.nixos.org/options?channel=unstable&from=0&size=50&sort=relevance&type=packages&query=lemmy

    You could always try to improve the packaging (there is an issue I had, but a ticket was already open and should be fixed at worst in the next version of lemmy, which was released a few days ago if I’m right)

    Of course, everything that make NixOS server hosting will making hosting lemmy with nixos easier, but most of the trouble I had with setting up my server a few years ago was understanding how to configure and run the DNS server on it.