I’m trying to set up a Lemmy instance using Docker on Ubuntu. This is my first time interacting with the open source community, so apologies if this is a stupid question. I’m not familiar with any common knowledge that might be obvious for people who frequently install software from github.

Anyway, in the official Lemmy installation guide, it says to download the following two files from the Lemmy github:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/main/docker/docker-compose.yml https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/main/docker/lemmy.hjson

However when you look at lemmy.hjson, it has a comment that says “This is a minimal lemmy config for the dev / main branch. Do not use for a release / stable version.”

I’m a little confused because I would expect that the setup guide would want me to use the latest release version, not the dev version. Why is this not the case? If I’m not supposed to use the release version, then who is the release version intended for?

Anyways I tried looking for the latest release version branch, which appears to be 0.17, and I got confused again when I saw folders for “prod” and “federation” in the Docker folder. What’s the difference?

Anyways can someone please help me understand the branch/folder structure? If I just want to run a regular Lemmy server with the latest stable code, which files should I use? Thanks