Beginner asking for advice on self hosting a lemmy instance
I am new to the world of self hosting a site, however I do currently have a web application thing successfully running on a digital ocean droplet with a free domain name.
Ideally I would like both of these things to run on the same ubuntu droplet. In my mind this should technically be possible with using docker to give each thing their own little corner being a good way to approach it.
However, I think the easy deploy lemmy uses caddy and the other thing I have users nginx, can both of these things work alongside each other fine if they have their own ports?
Is this a good way of approaching this or should I just make the lemmy instance its own droplet and go from there? Should I use something other than the lemmy easy deploy?
Do you have any other advice?
Thanks, if this is the wrong community for this can someone point me to the right one, I'm relatively new to lemmy.
I would probably just skip the Lemmy Easy Deploy and just do a regular deployment so it doesn't mess with your existing. Getting it running with just Docker is not that much harder and you just need to point your NGINX to it. Easy Deploy kind of assumes it's got the whole machine for itself so it'll try to bind on the same ports as your existing NGINX, so does the official Ansible as well.
You really just need a postgres instance, the backend, pictrs, the frontend and some NGINX glue to make it work. I recommend stealing the files from the official Ansible, as there's a few gotchas in the NGINX config as the frontend and backend share the same host and one is just layered on top.
They can if they're using different ports, however, I'd recommend just running Lemmy through the nginx server and route the data to each as needed. There's nginx configuration in the guide.
If you’d like to run them on the same Ubuntu VM, I’d recommend deploying them using docker, as that will make avoiding port conflicts much easier as well as keeping each application isolated.
You should also look into a reverse proxy so you can reroute traffic from your desired subdomain to non-standard ports (otherwise you’ll need to specify ports in the URL which gets weird). I recommend Nginx Proxy Manager which can also run in docker.
You could spin up another VM for Lemmy if resources get tight and you don’t mind the extra cost.