sneak/mastodon repository overview

⁠Single-container Mastodon

Don't ever host things anywhere but on a domain that you own.

This violates all the docker best practices and puts the whole-ass app inside a single container (including redis and postgres!) so that you can easily bring up a self-hosted mastodon on things like caprover self-hosted PaaS in a single "app" without having to worry about multiple containers or configuring cross-container links.

This is scratching an itch: I really just wanted a one-command single-user Mastodon instance that stores all of its state in a single directory I can tar and scp.

⁠Features

• Ubuntu bionic
• Everything in one container, including minimal postfix, postgres, and redis
• assets are precompiled on server startup
• all state is in one volume/dir
• database migrations can be run at startup

⁠Build Variables

• UID - numeric userid for mastodon user that everything runs as (default: 991)
• GID - numeric groupid for mastodon user that everything runs as (default: 991)
• REPO_URL: url to repository to use (default: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon.git)
• REPO_REV: git revision to use (default: c4118ba71ba31e408c02d289e111326ccc6f6aa2, mastodon v3.0.1)

⁠Environment Variables

• RUN_DB_MIGRATIONS (default: true, set to empty string "" to disable)
• SIDEKIQ_WORKERS: (default: 5)
• others: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/blob/master/.env.production.sample⁠

⁠Volumes

• /state - everything lives in here, db, redis, static files, logs, everything

Note that /state/envdir is an environment-variable-defining directory that is used for all service invocations, so you can set environment settings here for all processes without restarting the docker container.

⁠Ports

• 3000: mastodon web (no tls, do that elsewhere)
• 4000: mastodon streaming

⁠Credits

All praise to wonderfall's earlier single-container mastodon:

• https://github.com/Wonderfall/docker-mastodon⁠
• https://hub.docker.com/r/wonderfall/mastodon⁠

(I only made this because it did not include postfix/postgres/redis.)

⁠Author

Jeffrey Paul <[email protected]⁠>

⁠Example captain-definition

For use with Caprover.

(Note that the NetData system monitor container that ships with CapRover is spyware, and CapRover refuses to address that they are embedding spyware⁠, and the container maintainer refuses to patch out the spyware⁠ so it is advisable that you do not enable NetData when using CapRover unless you would like your usage data and IP and a unique identifier silently transmitted to Google.)

{
  "schemaVersion": 2,
  "imageName": "sneak/mastodon:v3.0.1"
}

⁠After First Run

# docker exec -ti <container name> /bin/bash
root@c81a376bf546:~/app# su -l --preserve-environment mastodon
mastodon@c81a376bf546:~$ cd app
mastodon@c81a376bf546:~/app$ RAILS_ENV=production envdir /state/envdir \
     bin/tootctl accounts create <newusername> \
     --email <your email> \
     --confirmed \
     --role admin

If WEB_DOMAIN != LOCAL_DOMAIN, make sure you have both set in your shell's environment (or in the envdir) before running tootctl to add your user. If you are running within a PaaS like Caprover or Heroku and you set them in the GUI, they should be defined on the container itself and already in your shell (and stay there with --preserve-environment). You can check by running env before running bin/tootctl.