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?

  • Meow.tar.gz@lemmy.goblackcat.comEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    It’s actually not hard to get Mastodon running behind an existing reverse proxy. It’s also not hard to run it in a docker container. I run mine in a docker container with no issues. When version 4.1.4 was released, I just ran a docker-compose pull, and voila, my instant was upgraded. I can share my configs with you if you want. What is your existing reverse proxy server?

    • Shiimiish@lm.ainyataovi.netOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      I run Nginx with Nginx Proxy Manager web-ui, which makes setting up proxy hosts and handling letsencrypt certificates really easy. I also use Portainer to manage my docker containers. This works well for the stuff I mentioned above (Nextcloud, Matrix, Lemmy mostly)

      If I can get Mastodon into the same setup, it’d be neat. I just found a lot of discussion with problems, so I thought I’ll ask about it before I spend a few hours in vain :)

    • sunbeam60@lemmy.oneEnglish
      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.

  • RxBrad@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    If you do use Docker, Mastodon seems to be a prime example of where you shouldn’t use the : latest tag and autoupdate with something like Watchtower.

    I initially installed with :latest a few days ago and it gave me 4.1.3 (the actual latest version had been 4.1.4 for quite awhile at that point). I saw other people mention that they “updated” to a 3.x release via :latest recently.