I just spun up Lemmy on my Kubernetes cluster with nginx-unprivileged and ingress-nginx. All is well so far! I’m thinking about posting the Kustomization manifests and continuing to maintain and publish OCI’s per version release of Lemmy.
I currently am running the instance I am responding from on kubernetes. I published a helm chart, and others are working on them too. I feel being able to quickly deploy a kubernetes instance will help a lot of smaller instances pop up, and eventually be a good method of handling larger instances once horizontal scaling is figured out.
I tested your helm chart and it just worked :)
Is there a place I can read more about the horizontal scaling issues lemmy has?
Saved this comment. It claims that the Lemmy frontend and backend are stateless and can be scaled arbitrarily, as can the web server. The media server (pict-rs) and Postgres database are the limitations to scaling. I’m working to deploy Lemmy with external object storage to solve media storage scaling and there’s probably some database experts figuring out Postgres optimization and scaling as well. None of the instances are big enough to run into serious issues with vertical scaling yet, so this won’t be a problem for a while.
I’ve got my pictrs backed by an S3, so that should scale well.
I had some issues with the image server, though, and I had multiple of them running at the same time at some point, so that may have been the cause.
👋 I’m not using Kustomize, just throwing
Deployment
manifests and such at the cluster manually. Works pretty nicely, though I had some trouble setting up the custom nginx stuff to proxy stuff in - I ended up running a new nginx instance and pointing theIngress
at that rather than the Lemmy pods directly. Maybe there’s a more elegant solution I’m missing?I am! @[email protected] and I worked on setting this up yesterday. He mentioned building a Helm chart for the whole shebang.
Yep I’m still working on a helm chart. Currently, each service is deployed with the bjw-s app-template helm chart, but I’d like to combine it all into a single chart.
The hardest part was getting
ingress-nginx
to pass ActivityPub requests to the backend, but we settled on a hack that seems to work well. We had to add the following configuration snippet to the frontend’s ingress annotations:nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/configuration-snippet: | if ($http_accept = "application/activity+json") { set $proxy_upstream_name "lemmy-lemmy-8536"; } if ($http_accept = "application/ld+json; profile=\"https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams\"") { set $proxy_upstream_name "lemmy-lemmy-8536"; } if ($request_method = POST) { set $proxy_upstream_name "lemmy-lemmy-8536"; }
The value of the variable is
$NAMESPACE-$SERVICE-$PORT
.
I tested this pretty thoroughly and haven’t been able to break it so far, but please let me know if anybody has a better solution!Firstly, awesome to hear you’re using bjw-s app-template helm chart. He’s my good friend and former coworker :)
I’m also doing what @[email protected] is doing.
While I don’t consider this completed yet I have posted how I’m doing things so far
That’s awesome! I love his Helm chart. It’s the most impressive Helm library I’ve ever seen. I maintain a bunch of charts and I exclusively use his library chart :)
I just mentioned in a response to @[email protected], but I feel like deploying a separate nginx is probably cleaner, I just didn’t want another SPOF that I could break at some point in the future.
Doing this made / path with Lemmy ui break, but posts and comments were actually updating according to logs. i set it up with a nginx container behind my ingress now and it appears everything works besides my comments and posts not being federated even though I can curl the links for troubleshooting federation without issue. Got any ideas?
Hmm I’m not sure! That code snippet should only affect routing conditionally. When you added the configuration snippet, did your ingress logs show the requests to
/
going to the frontend or backend?An nginx container behind ingress seems cleaner, I just didn’t want to add another point that I could possibly break lol
I just found out my posts are finally going through without any changes using the nginx proxy container to nginx ingress method! If you do have a way to do it all directly through nginx I’d love to see how it’s all done, maybe I was missing something outside of the snippet you posted.
Since it’s currently working I’ll look into spinning a test instance up when I get a chance and play with that ingress annotation.
Awesome! A separate nginx container is fine, so if it’s working I’d probably leave it. I’ll look through and see if there’s anything I missed in my comment though for brevity.
Yeah the separate nginx container just feels… Hacky lol