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Mastodon

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Revision as of 01:59, 10 January 2021 by Dank (talk | contribs)

Setting up a Masotdon server on Debian is somewhat annoying, due to the node and (to a lesser extent) ruby-based implementation. Most guides involve downloading and installing a large number of sources outside of APT. I hoped to avoid that.

My running install uses the 3.2 branch of Mastodon atop Debian Unstable.

First, determine your domain name. You'll likely be serving Mastodon as a virtual host in your main nginx/apache config, so give it its own, distinct FQDN. It is not trivial to change your server's name later (it will, at a minimum, break existing federations), so choose wisely.

System work

  • Via APT, install nodejs, redis-server, ruby-redis, rake, rbenv, ruby-bundler, postgresql-contrib, libpq-dev, libprotobuf-dev, protobuf-compiler, libidn11-dev, and yarnpkg ("yarn").
    • You will now have a PostgreSQL instance running on localhost:tcp/5432, if you didn't before.
    • You will now have a Redis instance running on localhost:tcp/6379, if you didn't before.
  • So far as I can tell, you must now symlink /usr/bin/yarnpkg to yarn in some PATH directory:
    • ln -s /usr/bin/yarnpkg /usr/local/bin/yarn
  • Prep the database:
    • echo "CREATE USER mastodon CREATEDB;" | sudo -u postgres psql
  • Create mastodon user (salt to taste):
    • sudo adduser --disabled-login --gecos "Mastodon service account" mastodon

User work

Remaining work will be done as the mastodon user, in its home directory.

  • git clone https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon.git ~/live
  • cd live
  • bundle config set --local deployment true
  • bundle config set --local without development:test
  • bundle install
  • RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake mastodon:setup
    • Use the same PostgreSQL user name you created earlier.
    • So far as I can tell, use a blank password for PostgresQDL and Redis.
    • I do (n)ot upload files to the "cloud", whatever that even means

Webserver work