Mastodon: Installation

[Fastidious]

Are there somewhere instructions on how to get Mastodon running without Docker? Thanks!

[Gargron]

You need:

• PostgreSQL (database)
• Redis (timelines, background queue and ActionCable)
• Ruby (preferably 2.2.4 as that's what I tested everything on, installation with rbenv or rvm is easiest)
• Node.js/npm (for the front-end JS but it's only needed during assets:precompile)
• ffmpeg (for WebM uploads)

Pretty standard Rails deployment... Clone the repository, then:

bundle install --deployment --without test development
npm install

Create an .env.production file with the configuration parameters from the .env.production.sample. To initialize the database:

RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rails db:setup

To pre-compile the assets:

RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rails assets:precompile

Then there's the web process you'd wanna run like:

RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rails s -p 3000

And the background workers:

RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec sidekiq -q default -q mailers

And then there's the rake tasks you may want to run periodically from a cronjob described in the main README. You'll also want to run an nginx or haproxy server in front of that localhost:3000 of the app and handling the domain name and SSL in there.

I also recommend getting a SSL certificate for your domain via Let's Encrypt. Now this is sort of a rough sketch of a guide, if anyone does a full deployment it'd be great if they wrote down their exact steps somewhere, or I might do it myself later.

[localhost]

Another dependency is ImageMagick.

[arg2009]

I'd like to add something here to help anyone who may be having trouble setting up the SSL proxy. This had me racking my brains for 3 days.

If you are using Apache as the proxy to wrap the app in SSL and you have set LOCAL_HTTPS=true within your .env.production file, the application enters a redirect loop because Mastodon thinks a normal HTTP is being used and so returns a 301 redirect to the HTTPS url (which you just came from).

You need to tell Mastodon (in fact Rails) that you are in fact using HTTPS by setting the X-Forwarded-Proto header in your Apache configuration like so.

RequestHeader set X-Forwarded-Proto "https"

I finally have my instance running smoothly and federated with mastodon.social =)

[Gargron]

I have added a production guide to the wiki

[HongPong]

New production guide wiki URL is here. In the new repo.