I’m trying to get Lemmy up and running on an Ubuntu 22.04 host. I’ve followed this guide supplemented by googling.

I can actually get to the front end, but it gives me “There was an error on the server.” When I dig into the logs, I see this:

"thread 'main' panicked at 'Error connecting to postgres://lemmy:<my pg password>@postgres:5432/lemmy: FATAL:  password authentication failed for user \"lemmy\"\n","stream":"stderr","time":"2023-06-26T03:14:17.47460915Z"}

The only thing I can find about this error related to Lemmy is this thread, which indicates that the password was not defined in the docker-compose.yml file prior to starting the containers. I have since redone the configuration three times, each time deleting the volumes folder and double-checking that my postgre password is correct both in docker-compose.yml and lemmy.hjson.

Any ideas what might be the problem? Thank you kindly for any help you can provide!

  • ActuallyRubenEnglish
    2•1 year ago

    First of all, make sure the PostgreSQL username matches as well.

    Does your password contain any special characters such as quotes, dollar signs or backslashes? They can have special meanings in yaml, resulting in the password being different from what you’d expect.

    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      Username definitely matches!

      And yes, I have several special characters, but the password is surrounded by single quotes in docker-compose.yml, so that should not matter, right?

        • @[email protected]OPEnglish
          1•1 year ago

          This makes sense, and I do have a dollar sign in my password…

          However, I have confirmed that postgres does in fact parse the password correctly, as I can log in with the defined username/password combo directly using psql

          So I think that disproves this theory, doesn’t it?

          edit: I tried getting rid of the dollar sign just in case… unfortunately I’m still getting the same error