How to Install Lemmy on OpenSUSE Latest

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.

Prerequisites

  • A server or virtual machine running the latest version of OpenSUSE with root/administrator access.
  • Access to a terminal or SSH session.

Step 1: Install Rust and PostgreSQL

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

Step 2: Clone and Build Lemmy

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.

Step 3: Configure Lemmy

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.

Step 4: Start Lemmy

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

Step 5: Access Lemmy

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.

Conclusion

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.