I finally managed to selfhost Lemmy and Matrix, now it is time to also get a selfhosted Mastodon instance up. A few questions before I start:

I did some research into the topic and it seems that Mastodon doesn’t like to run behind an existing reverse proxy and there are quite a few tweaks necessary to get it running - can someone confirm this? Or is this something easily set up?

I’m currently leaning to run it on a dedicated VPS (due to the issue above and also because it seems to need quite a bit of disk space) - this opens up to do a non-docker installation and follow the official install path. Do you think this will make it easier to keep it updated to new releases in the future?

If going with a docker install there seem to be quite a few problems with updating (at least a lot of threads discussing failed update procedures sprung up when I googles “mastodon docker update”) - can someone confirm? Are there easy to follow guides for a docker based update routine?

Right now it seems the easiest would be to run on a dedicated server, follow the native installation procedure and use the templates provided for nginx, certbot, … thoughts?

  • @[email protected]English
    1•1 year ago

    Is there a good guide for Mastodon in Docker? I’ve followed a few but they all get stuck at various points.

    • Meow.tar.gzEnglish
      2•1 year ago

      You need to actually piece together those few to come up with one cohesive working instance. I can share with you the docker-compose.yml file that worked for me, if that will help.

      version: '3'
services:
  db:
    restart: always
    image: postgres:14-alpine
    shm_size: 256mb
    networks:
      - internal_network
    healthcheck:
      test: ['CMD', 'pg_isready', '-U', 'postgres']
    volumes:
      - ./postgres14:/var/lib/postgresql/data
    environment:
      - 'POSTGRES_HOST_AUTH_METHOD=trust'

  redis:
    restart: always
    image: redis:7-alpine
    networks:
      - internal_network
    healthcheck:
      test: ['CMD', 'redis-cli', 'ping']
    volumes:
      - ./redis:/data

  # es:
  #   restart: always
  #   image: docker.elastic.co/elasticsearch/elasticsearch:7.17.4
  #   environment:
  #     - "ES_JAVA_OPTS=-Xms512m -Xmx512m -Des.enforce.bootstrap.checks=true"
  #     - "xpack.license.self_generated.type=basic"
  #     - "xpack.security.enabled=false"
  #     - "xpack.watcher.enabled=false"
  #     - "xpack.graph.enabled=false"
  #     - "xpack.ml.enabled=false"
  #     - "bootstrap.memory_lock=true"
  #     - "cluster.name=es-mastodon"
  #     - "discovery.type=single-node"
  #     - "thread_pool.write.queue_size=1000"
  #   networks:
  #      - external_network
  #      - internal_network
  #   healthcheck:
  #      test: ["CMD-SHELL", "curl --silent --fail localhost:9200/_cluster/health || exit 1"]
  #   volumes:
  #      - ./elasticsearch:/usr/share/elasticsearch/data
  #   ulimits:
  #     memlock:
  #       soft: -1
  #       hard: -1
  #     nofile:
  #       soft: 65536
  #       hard: 65536
  #   ports:
  #     - '127.0.0.1:9200:9200'

  web:
    #build: .
    #image: ghcr.io/mastodon/mastodon
    image: tootsuite/mastodon:latest
    restart: always
    env_file: .env.production
    command: bash -c "rm -f /mastodon/tmp/pids/server.pid; bundle exec rails s -p 3000"
    networks:
      - external_network
      - internal_network
    healthcheck:
      # prettier-ignore
      test: ['CMD-SHELL', 'wget -q --spider --proxy=off localhost:3000/health || exit 1']
    ports:
      - '127.0.0.1:3000:3000'
    depends_on:
      - db
      - redis
      # - es
    volumes:
      - ./public/system:/mastodon/public/system

  streaming:
    #build: .
    #image: ghcr.io/mastodon/mastodon
    image: tootsuite/mastodon:latest
    restart: always
    env_file: .env.production
    command: node ./streaming
    networks:
      - external_network
      - internal_network
    healthcheck:
      # prettier-ignore
      test: ['CMD-SHELL', 'wget -q --spider --proxy=off localhost:4000/api/v1/streaming/health || exit 1']
    ports:
      - '127.0.0.1:4000:4000'
    depends_on:
      - db
      - redis

  sidekiq:
    #build: .
    #image: ghcr.io/mastodon/mastodon
    image: tootsuite/mastodon:latest
    restart: always
    env_file: .env.production
    command: bundle exec sidekiq
    depends_on:
      - db
      - redis
    networks:
      - external_network
      - internal_network
    volumes:
      - ./public/system:/mastodon/public/system
    healthcheck:
      test: ['CMD-SHELL', "ps aux | grep '[s]idekiq\ 6' || false"]

  ## Uncomment to enable federation with tor instances along with adding the following ENV variables
  ## http_proxy=http://privoxy:8118
  ## ALLOW_ACCESS_TO_HIDDEN_SERVICE=true
  # tor:
  #   image: sirboops/tor
  #   networks:
  #      - external_network
  #      - internal_network
  #
  # privoxy:
  #   image: sirboops/privoxy
  #   volumes:
  #     - ./priv-config:/opt/config
  #   networks:
  #     - external_network
  #     - internal_network

networks:
  external_network:
  internal_network:
    internal: true