I’m currently running an instance on Ubuntu but I’m wondering if it can be moved to my windows computer?
Wouldn’t recommend running production services on windows.
Wouldn’t recommend running
production services onwindows.
Maybe but it doesn’t seem like a terribly good idea. All prior art for Lemmy, and most serious server stuff on the Internet, is on Linux. It would be a lot of effort and would result in a worse solution than the tools that already exist.
You have Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) which will allow you to run Ubuntu within Windows.
Or you have Docker for Windows which also utilises WSL in a similar manner.
So yes, although not a native Windows exe, it’s perfectly possible.
something to keep in mind is that both WSL2 and Linux container on Docker Windows use virtual machines
these come with a drawback of additional overhead or cheaper hosted VPS don’t allow to nest virtual machines inside their cheap onesAnd definitely use WSL2.
If you compiled from source maybe, but that’s the point of docker, you can run docker containers anywhere
Everyone else here is saying it’s not recommended. I’d agree with that. But I’m super curious to hear whether we can, not whether we should! So, OP: I say give it a go and report back what problems you run in to!
I leaned no one on Lemmy are as helpful as they seem. Nor as nice… I gave up on trying to run my own instance… My life is too busy and hard to find time for this anyway…
Oh, I’m sorry that you found that :( Hopefully we can all help each other more :) If you have more time in the future I’m interested to hear how you go setting up Lemmy on Windows :)
I believe it can be, but what I’ve found in general with respect to my fediverse journey is that pretty much everything is built for Linux. If you want to use windows, you’ll likely have to blaze a trail for yourself.
I had one windows PC in my server farm initially, but installed Linux after I realized most things I wanted to run really wanted me to be running Linux.
There are lots of docker deployment examples, and no reason it shouldn’t run in docker on windows. It supports Ubuntu containers. https://docs.docker.com/desktop/wsl/
One thing to note with Docker on Windows is that it will be running the Linux subsystem on top of the Windows stuff when you run Docker, so there will be a performance hit to do that.
It will work, but not necessarily as well as you would like.
Wsl isn’t actually slower, it uses a kernel personality mode thing that basically means Linux runs as a first class process.
The performance hit doesn’t show up for most stuff, but iirc it does show up for some heavy io, networking and some synchronization.
Still, highly not recommended.