Lemmy is a free and open-source alternative to Reddit that allows users to create and share communities, topics, and posts. In this tutorial, we will be installing Lemmy on the latest version of OpenSUSE.
Lemmy's backend is built in Rust and uses PostgreSQL for its database. To ensure that Lemmy's installation goes smoothly, we must first install these dependencies.
To install Rust, we can use OpenSUSE's package manager zypper:
sudo zypper in rust
To install PostgreSQL, we can run:
sudo zypper in postgresql postgresql-server postgresql-contrib
Once these packages are installed, we need to initialize the PostgreSQL database:
sudo postgresql-setup --initdb
Finally, start the PostgreSQL service:
sudo systemctl start postgresql
We also want to ensure that the PostgreSQL service starts automatically on boot:
sudo systemctl enable postgresql
Let's start by cloning the Lemmy repository from GitHub:
git clone https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy.git
Once we have the repository, we can navigate to the folder and build Lemmy:
cd lemmy
cargo build --release
This can take a few minutes, depending on your server's resources.
With our dependencies installed and Lemmy built, let's move on to its configuration. Lemmy looks for its configuration in a file named .env, so we need to create one:
cp .env.example .env
Now, let's edit .env with your favorite text editor:
nano .env
Inside the file, you will find several settings that configure Lemmy, such as database username, password, and address.
The default setting is to use SQLite as the database, however, since we previously installed PostgreSQL, we will configure Lemmy to use it instead.
Locate the following line:
DATABASE_URL=sqlite:lemmy.db
And replace it with:
DATABASE_URL=postgresql://<db_user>:<db_password>@localhost/lemmy
Replace <db_user> and <db_password> with your PostgreSQL database credentials.
Save and exit the file.
With our configuration completed, we can start Lemmy's server:
./target/release/lemmy_server
We should now see the Lemmy terminal app starting and displaying log output. If everything has gone well, we will see the following message:
Server started on: http://localhost:8536
Now let's access Lemmy on our web browser. Open a new tab and enter the following address:
http://localhost:8536
If everything has worked, we should now see the Lemmy homepage.
In this tutorial, we learned how to install Lemmy on the latest version of OpenSUSE. We installed dependencies, built the source code, and configured the environment. Finally, we started Lemmy's server and accessed it on our web browser.
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