lemmy/docs/src/contributing_federation_development.md

Federation Development

Setup

If you don't have a local clone of the Lemmy repo yet, just run the following command:

git clone https://yerbamate.dev/LemmyNet/lemmy.git -b federation

If you already have the Lemmy repo cloned, you need to add a new remote:

git remote add federation https://yerbamate.dev/LemmyNet/lemmy.git
git checkout federation
git pull federation federation

Running locally

You need to have the following packages installed, the Docker service needs to be running.

• docker
• docker-compose
• cargo
• yarn

Then run the following

cd dev/federation-test
./run-federation-test.bash

After the build is finished and the docker-compose setup is running, open 127.0.0.1:8540 and 127.0.0.1:8550 in your browser to use the test instances. You can login as admin with username lemmy_alpha and lemmy_beta respectively, with password lemmy.

Running on a server

Note that federation is currently in alpha. Only use it for testing, not on any production server, and be aware that you might have to wipe the instance data at one point or another.

Follow the normal installation instructions, either with Ansible or manually. Then replace the line image: dessalines/lemmy:v0.x.x in /lemmy/docker-compose.yml with image: dessalines/lemmy:federation. Also add the following in /lemmy/lemmy.hjson:

    federation: {
        enabled: true
        instance_whitelist: example.com
    }

Afterwards, and whenver you want to update to the latest version, run these commands on the server:

cd /lemmy/
sudo docker-compose pull
sudo docker-compose up -d