Creating New Instance, Looking for Advice

[dperry39660]

Greetings,

I had a box I wasn’t using anymore and converted it to an Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, because I wanted to try to create my own Mastodon Instance for my extended family.

I have been slowly trying to create a new instance using a few tutorials I found online. First I tried one using docker (https://www.howtoforge.com/how-to-install-mastodon-social-network-with-docker-on-ubuntu-1804/amp/) and when that failed I thought I’d try following a few, mostly identical, tutorials for setting up without docker. No luck on either end, and, although I’m learning a lot, I think I’m going to have to start over from scratch.

Any pointers on how to start, whether to go with docker or not, and a good guide (written for a newb)?

Huge thanks!
dp

[saper]

It would be good to say something about the problems you are having setting them up. Error messages can be very helpful in getting you going.

[dperry39660]

Thanks for the response. I have started from scratch using this code from github -GitHub - shleeable/mastodon_guide - but I am going line by line to make sure I dont miss any error messages. This approach uses docker and appears to be working better than my previous attempts.

I did run into a series of errors when I got to this line

docker-compose run --rm web rails assets:precompile

But when I manually entered the VAPID_PUBLIC_KEY and VAPID_PRIVATE_KEY, from the line of code I used from the howtoforge guide that worked out:

docker-compose run --rm web bundle exec rake mastodon:webpush:generate_vapid_key

Unfortunately, I ran into errors on the next line:

docker-compose run --rm web rails db:migrate

This was the start of the error output:

Starting live_redis_1 … done
Starting live_db_1 … done
rails aborted!
PG::ConnectionBad: could not translate host name “db” to address: Name or servic e not known

From what I can tell, I think this means I have an issue with postgresql, the .env.production file, or more likely both. Here is what I have for .env.production (the defaults):

DB_HOST=db
DB_USER=postgres
DB_NAME=postgres
DB_PASS=
DB_PORT=5432

Thank you. Any help is appreciated.

dp

[msh]

Seems to be a networking config issue in docker. The container cannot resolve “db” into an IP address to connect. Docker networking seems like black magic to me.

Couple of things I would do starting from scratch though:

1. I would use the official documentation starting from https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/prerequisites/ which I found pretty decent.

2. I would not use docker if you have a dedicated VM or physical machine at your disposal. It really is a misapplication of docker and seems to handle any system issues with a sledgehammer. I ran into issues causing it to repeatedly terminate and restart my db container, which I believe led to index corruption on my database. I fixed the obvious corruption and moved totally off docker and everything runs way WAY better.

Hope you make progress… The more new instances out there the better!

[dperry39660]

I decided to grind on a little bit more with docker-compose, and I modified the .yml file to the following:

db:
restart: always
image: “postgres” # :9.6-alpine
env_file:
- database.env # configure postgres
networks:
- internal_network
healthcheck:
test: [“CMD”, “pg_isready”, “-U”, “postgres”]
volumes:
- ./postgres:/var/lib/postgresql/data

this is what I put it in database.env:

POSTGRES_USER=mastodon
POSTGRES_PASSWORD=mastodon_P@$$
POSTGRES_DB=mastodon_database

Then I modified .env.production to match it

DB_HOST=db
DB_USER=mastodon
DB_NAME=mastodon_database
DB_PASS=mastodon_P@$$
DB_PORT=5432

Following that I took docker-compose down and then built it again, and this time the db:migrate command worked with no errors.

So with that and another little tweek. The instance is running and when I log in (both internally and externally) I get the log in page.

I’m still not up and running, because I still haven’t received the authorization email. However, I’ll search the forum for an answer and maybe start a new post with the problem if I can’t figure it out.

Thanks