Quickstart for Photon

A replacement for Lemmy-ui with more features, a better design, and more customizability. It includes Photon UI + Lemmy (an Open-source Reddit alternative. Create your discussion platform with Lemmy) With Lemmy, you can easily host your server, and all these servers are federated, and connected to the same universe, called the Fediverse. For a link aggregator, this means that someone registered on one server can subscribe to communities elsewhere, and can have discussions with people on a completely different server.

Deploy Photon on Elestio

1. Open the Photon deployment page and sign in, or create an account.
2. Choose a cloud provider, a region and a data center. Pick the region closest to your users for the lowest latency.
3. Choose an instance size. Elestio only lists the sizes that can run Photon properly (at least 1 vCPU and 1 GB of RAM).
4. Choose your support plan and the maintenance window for system and software updates (times are in UTC).
5. Click Create Service. Photon is deployed and ready in a few minutes, and you receive an email with the access details.

The full walkthrough with screenshots is in the installation guide.

Access Photon

Open your service in the Elestio dashboard and go to the Overview tab. Click Display Admin UI to reveal the URL, username and password of your Photon instance.

If the password field is blank, Photon does not ship with a pre-created admin user: open the admin URL to start its setup. Software without a web interface, such as databases, is reached with the credentials and port listed in the same tab. See Admin UI and credentials.

Next steps

• Custom domain and SSL: point your own domain to Photon (guide).
• Backups: new services follow a 3-2-1 backup strategy by default (backups).
• Updates: manage the Photon version and update policy (software versions and updates).
• Learn Photon: read the official Photon documentation.