Belatedly:
The installation instructions given in the philomena repo are incomplete, but in such a way that you can get awfully far before it becomes apparent that the installation instructions are incomplete. Among the issues are several things that make it impossible as published to run in "production" mode. Unfortunately, that is required to be able to tie in a cert from Let's Encrypt.
Four years ago, it was said that complete installation instructions would be done in six months. As of right now, there still aren't any instructions.
My health has taken a few hits since opening AMS, so I no longer have entire weekends to devote to attempting to update Philomena. But I haven't given up yet, and if I can manage to create a procedure to get Philomena _properly_ up and running, I'll publish it.