Installing Lemmy on macOS

Lemmy is a free and open-source link aggregator and discussion platform. In this tutorial, we will go through the steps to install Lemmy on macOS.

Prerequisites

A macOS running device.
Homebrew package manager installed. To install Homebrew on macOS, open the terminal and run the following command:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install.sh)"

Install Rust

Lemmy is written in Rust programming language, so we need to install Rust on our mac before we can install Lemmy. To do that, open the terminal and enter the following command:

$ brew install rust

Install Postgres

Lemmy requires a database, and we will use Postgres. To install Postgres on macOS, run the following command in the terminal:

$ brew install postgresql

After installation, start the Postgres service using the following command:

$ brew services start postgresql

Clone Lemmy Repository

Now let's clone the Lemmy repository using the following command:

$ git clone https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy.git

Change to the cloned directory using the following command:

$ cd lemmy

Compile Lemmy

Lemmy is written in Rust programming language, and to run it, we need to compile it. To compile and build Lemmy, run the following command:

$ cargo build --release

Configure Lemmy

After successful compilation, initialize the Lemmy configuration file using the following command:

$ cp .env.sample .env

Next, open the .env file in your preferred text editor, and add the following configuration:

DATABASE_URL=postgres://lemmy:lemmy@localhost/lemmy
FRONT_END_DIR=../lemmy-ui
FRONT_END_API_URL=http://localhost:8536

Save and close the file.

Create Lemmy Database

To create a Lemmy database, run the following command:

$ createdb -U postgres -O lemmy -E Unicode -T template0 -h localhost lemmy

Install and Configure Lemmy Frontend

Lemmy also comes with a frontend written in Rust. To compile and run the frontend, we first need to install npm. To install npm on macOS, run the following command:

$ brew install npm

Next, navigate to the ui directory and install dependencies using the following command:

$ cd ui
$ npm install

Finally, build the frontend using the following command:

$ npm run build

Run Lemmy

After successful installation and configuration, run the following command to start Lemmy:

$ RUST_BACKTRACE=1 cargo run --release

Now open a web browser and go to http://localhost:8536 to visit Lemmy.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we went through the steps to install and configure Lemmy on macOS. Have fun exploring Lemmy and its features!