Matthew

You can use the FQDN of your Lemmy instance in the nginx.conf file. I’ve uploaded my files to a gist here as an example.

You should be able just to replace any mention of lemmy.mydomain.com with your FQDN of your Lemmy instance and replace any your-postgres-password with your real Postgres password. You must also set your SMTP provider settings in the email section of config.hjson (I use Brevo). In the docker-compose.yml file, you can change which port you want to map from the host; I used 8976 in mine. Then just point your internet-facing reverse proxy to the host and whichever port you chose.

I’m not using Ansible to automate it at all. I’m just updating the files manually, as needed, and doing docker compose commands. I’m using Docker volumes to persist the data on them, so feel free to change any of those basic things you want.

Think of the NGINX proxy in Lemmy’s docker-compose.yml file as the entry point to Lemmy from outside the Docker network. For instance, I don’t have any ports mapped for the individual services except for the NGINX service. The NGINX proxy in this docker-compose file will access the other services through the internal docker network, so it isn’t a problem if you set up your nginx.conf file with the service’s names. With that done, you could map any port you want for the NGINX service from the host, then point your internet-facing reverse proxy to that.

I also plan on setting up a Mastodon server, but I haven’t gotten to it yet. So I don’t have anything specific to add other than it will work similarly by using docker’s port mapping or service names depending on whether each service needs to be internet-facing or only communicate internally.

No, no you should not. I haven’t used homepage but you probably just need to attach the services to the same network or just map the ports on the host and just use the host IP.

Since nobody bothers to check previous posts (even from just a day or two ago), I won’t bother with the details. All I will say is to learn the purposes of an MX record and how sending email works (and the differences). Hint: MX records have nothing to do with sending emails from your server. Just use a third party SMTP service in your config.hjson file.

I agree with @[email protected] that the inclusion of a postfix SMTP container and using that in the example configs is probably doing more harm than good.

You shouldn’t need the Postfix container at all unless you want to manually set that up and know what you’re doing. You configure your SMTP settings in the config.hjson file as outlined in the example defaults.hjson file. I’m using a third-party SMTP provider to avoid any deliverability issues with sending emails directly from my server’s IP address. Just ensure you configured your DNS correctly (DKIM, etc.), punch in the info, and it should work.

I ran email server with Mailcow Docker. Easiest way I have found. It is perfect to host your own mailbox but as other have said, the sending from your IP might just get blocked by other big mail servers. Luckily Mailcow allows you to use it as a SMTP relay and you can route outbound mail through the well known SMTP services.