this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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9
Issues hosting Lemmy (via ansible) (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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(Using https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ansible)

The ansible-playbook command itself connected to the VPS and completed without any errors or warnings. This is on a completely fresh VPS with Ubuntu Server 22.04.

I created all directories needed in the guide, and the only file I modified was the inventory/hosts file - filling in the username/domain for SSH, domain name, contact email and adding the location of the private key for SSH.

The guide didn't note any changes to config.hjson I needed to make, so I copied that file as requested but left it with the default content. I'm thinking if I missed something it's most likely there.

I couldn't access the web UI and with some investigation I found the dessalines/lemmy:0.17.4 (backend) container is continually restarting, apparently because it can't reach the database - sudo docker container logs <id> returns the following:

thread 'main' panicked at 'Error connecting to postgres://lemmy:PasswordRedacted@postgres:5432/lemmy', crates/db_schema/src/utils.rs:161:56

I'm not sure what to do at this point, so I would be very appreciative of any help with this issue.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

ok thanks - I'm not very familiar with the lemmy installation process so I will need to check if possibly the schema objects in the database aren't created until the admin user is first set up, which is another possibility, but they definitely aren't there right now - I'll set up a fresh install to check in a few minutes.

Switching gears a bit - when you say you can't access the web UI, can you elaborate on that? The web server should be running. You are going to https://your.url, presumably and then what do you actually see in the browser? It should show an initial setup screen - do you not see anything or is there some kind of error message? When the ansible script runs to create the instance does it throw any errors at all or everything looks happy in the output, including creation of your ssl certs?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

No errors of any kind in the ansible script. nginx is running, and it's at https://lemmy.name - I get some gateway timeout errors once in a while, but that's all. When I do get error pages, they are served via https at least, so I don't think there's anything wrong with that part.

I assume this is because the lemmy backend container is continually restarting (as I detailed more in my original post and other replies here) due to database connection errors

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ok so I ran a clean install and confirmed that the database objects exist. So that's definitely the problem. Your database is munted. An interesting thing happened when I re-ran the playbook - I noticed it didn't rebuild the postgres container. Very suspicious! Let's try blowing it away completely and re-running your script:

docker stop lemmyname_postgres_1

docker rm lemmyname_postgres_1

now re run the ansible playbook and let's see if that works.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Ran those commands successfully, then the playbook again. Playbook has zero errors or warnings.

The postgres container was remade.. with the same broken database. Went into it with psql like before, did \c lemmy, then \dt - same error - did not find any relations.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

weird. it's like it failed to install the postgres public schema properly. I am not at all familiar with ansible but I see you can set verbosity. Do you think it would be worth trying that?

According to link below you can preface your playbook command with ANSIBLE_DEBUG=true ANSIBLE_VERBOSITY=4

https://www.shellhacks.com/ansible-enable-debug-increase-verbosity/

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This alternative installer might be a way around this issue: https://github.com/ubergeek77/Lemmy-Easy-Deploy

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Wiped the VPS clean, new 22.04 server install.

Deployed using that installer.

Exact same issue. The lemmy container cannot reach the database and continually restarts. I'll post some logs, but they're practically identical to what I posted before:

lemmy container logs:

`thread 'main' panicked at 'Error connecting to postgres://lemmy:PasswordRedacted@postgres:5432/lemmy', crates/db_schema/src/utils.rs:161:56

sudo docker ps output:

CONTAINER ID   IMAGE                        COMMAND                  CREATED          STATUS
 PORTS                                                                                         NAMES
9eaa62ea6f99   caddy:latest                 "caddy run --config …"   12 minutes ago   Up 12 minutes
 0.0.0.0:80->80/tcp, :::80->80/tcp, 0.0.0.0:443->443/tcp, :::443->443/tcp, 443/udp, 2019/tcp   lemmy-easy-deploy-proxy-1
a10009ed128d   dessalines/lemmy-ui:0.17.4   "docker-entrypoint.s…"   12 minutes ago   Up 12 minutes
                                                                                               lemmy-easy-deploy-lemmy-ui-1
a166b1486d51   dessalines/lemmy:0.17.4      "/app/lemmy"             12 minutes ago   Restarting (101) 41 seconds ago                                                                                                 lemmy-easy-deploy-lemmy-1
08329653260b   asonix/pictrs:0.3.1          "/sbin/tini -- /usr/…"   12 minutes ago   Up 12 minutes
 6669/tcp, 8080/tcp                                                                            lemmy-easy-deploy-pictrs-1
51af8f312511   postgres:15-alpine           "docker-entrypoint.s…"   12 minutes ago   Up 12 minutes
lemmy-easy-deploy-postgres-1
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

well, that rules out your local system and ansible, at least. It seems like there's an inability for the docker containers to reach postgres definitely at the install and probably at runtime - can we check this?

first let's make sure the postgres container is on the network and has an address:

sudo docker exec -it <yourinstance>_postgres_1 /bin/sh

once you're on the container

ifconfig

which should return on the second line: inet addr:172.18.0.4 (or similar ipV4 address)

exit to return to the host and let's test connecting from the host :

nc -zv 172.18.0.4 5432 (use IP from the DB container)

Ubuntu host should respond something like : Connection to 172.18.0.4 5432 port [tcp/postgresql] succeeded!

now let's try the containers

sudo docker exec -it <yourinstance>_lemmy-ui_1 /bin/sh

now from that container test connectivity to postgres:

nc -zv 172.18.0.4 5432 (use IP from the DB container)

now the other

sudo docker exec -it <yourinstance>_lemmy_1 /bin/sh

on the docker containers the nc command should return something like

172.18.0.4 (172.18.0.4:5432) open

is that working?