Thank you very much for the kind words!

Please be my guest! It would make me happy to know this was helping people join Lemmy!

seriously, distributing the load helps a LOT. Though if you can't spin up your own instance one thing you can do is try and host pictures externally, in !youshouldknow!youshouldknow@lemmy.world a post mentioned how to do it for images in comments since by default it has you upload if you don't manually put in ![image](link)

Thanks! Fix pushed.

The Lemmy maintainers themselves seem to lock it at 0.3.1, and I wanted to maintain parity with their deployment. I know pictrs is up to at least 0.3.3, and has a release candidate for 0.4, but upstream Lemmy uses 0.3.1 for whatever reason, so that's why I lock it there.

It's excluded from the update checker because I don't have a stable way to check what version upstream is using. The Lemmy update checker just checks to see what the latest tag on LemmyNet/lemmy is. I could try and pull the latest Gitea tag for pictrs, but since upstream Lemmy isn't using the latest version, that's not really an option as something might break.

I considered trying to parse their docker-compose.yml file to see what version they use, but they seem to be restructuring their docker folder right now. The folder in main is completely different from the one tagged 0.17.4. If I assume a certain directory path for that file for every version after this, but they move it, my script will break. Sadly, until their Docker deployment files seem like they're going unchanged for a good few versions, I'll have to do it manually for now.

Can you explain? I provide an interface for everything available in lemmy.hjson, so I am not sure what else I would add.

I will note though, this is primarily intended for beginners. More advanced users would probably prefer to manage this on their own with Docker Compose, and those people will be very well versed in messing with the environment variables and all that.

If there are variables you want to pass in, you can simply edit docker-compose.yml.template to import an env_file, that way you can pass anything you want into the container.

I hope it works out for you!

Quick note: For email, pretty much every VPS provider out there blocks port 25, which is needed for emails to send. They do this to prevent spam emails from being sent en-masse from their servers. This is likely why your Ansible installation is not sending emails.

Since it's uncommon for servers to support email, this script disables it by default. If your provider supports port 25 (or you get approved to use it, some VPS providers allow you to request access), check config.env and set USE_EMAIL to true. This will set up everything you need for email.

I haven't been able to test email, so let me know how it works if you do! This doesn't do any of the DNS verification some email provders require, so your emails might be sent to spam. Lemmy doesn't really have documentation about how to set this up properly. If someone makes guidelines for this, I can update my project to do that automatically as well.

It will work on pretty much anything that has a public IP and a domain pointing to that IP. The only thing that won't work "out of the box" for most users is email, as most VPS providers block port 25. If you've requested access to port 25 and have been approved to use it, you can edit config.env to turn on the email service.

As for your SSL certificate, unfortunately this does not support importing your own certificate. It's made for beginners, after all :p

But there should be no problems with Caddy simply requesting a new one for you!