I think this is one of the more sensible answers here. If your workstation is windows, then utilize WSL for ansible and deploy onto a ubuntu or debian host (I’m assuming it works fine on debian, I used ubuntu). You might run into some issues with ansible dependencies as the readme doesn’t seem to cover everything from what i remember, but once ansible works and has the correct configs, deployment is super easy.
The ansible playbook just deploys docker containers. It does nginx proxy config, deploys the docker software, and then creates the compose file and deploys the containers. The reality is the ansible deploy and docker deploy both use docker. The ansible playbook just does more of everything all at once in an automated way.
My process is similar, but i don’t use the !ommunity@instance format. I just copy the url and search for it.
Search: “https://lemmy.world/c/selfhosted”
it will initially return Nothing found but after another second, it shows up and i can click it and then subscribe to get new posts and comments.
Of course, the real test will be when it comes time to update to the next Lemmy version…
it is easy enough. Simply run the playbook again. well, git pull the ansible playbook again and then run it. alternatively you can just use docker compose now on your lemmy server. I made some aliases on my lemmy instance based on what i use elsewhere. I think I got them from a linuxserver.io tutorial ages ago. you will need to adjust the container versions for this to be viable as the version is hardcoded and they only have a “latest” tag for arm.
alias dckill=‘docker kill $(docker ps -q)’
alias dclogs='docker-compose -f /srv/lemmy/lemmy.domain/docker-compose.yml logs -tf --tail=“50” ’
alias dcpull=‘docker-compose -f /srv/lemmy/lemmy.domain/docker-compose.yml pull’
Another distro doesn’t magically fix difficulty for a custom setup. You can checkout other distros and see if maybe you like how they are laid out and how their package managers work, but the general config portion of deploying your apps is going to be the same regardless. Something to consider is how are you getting help for your setup? Is it some content creator you follow who generally does their videos/guides on ubuntu so that is how you figured everything out? Do you have friends or family who use it? If your source of knowledge and help is familiar with ubuntu, it is best to stick with it so you continue to have that resource. I can fumble around most distros, but if you want specific help, you are much better off asking me about specific issues inside an RPM based distro. I imagine others are similar in that they have generally applicable knowledge and a huge amount of specific distro knowledge since that is generally what they use.
I’m using fedora for my main workstation at home. most of my servers are run on almalinux but I do have a few that are ubuntu. At work we only use and support RHEL.
I ran into some dependency issues(needed to install ansible-collection-community-docker on my fedora workstation), but after that it ran fine and installed everything first run. I made some adjustments to the inventory config afterwards, but aside from that it just worked.