Ansible playbook for installing Mastodon

This playbook contains several roles for provisioning a ready-to-go Mastodon instance.

Prerequisites for running the playbook

• Python 2.x (>= 2.7.12)
• Virtualenv (>= 15.0.3)
• pip/python-pip (>= 8.x)

for testing purposes:

• Vagrant >= 1.9.3

Setup

$ virtualenv env
$ source env/bin/activate
$ pip install -r requirements.txt

Running the playbooks

Bare

This playbook is intended to be run on a "bare" (virtual) server, with the support for provisioning the Mastodon stack as well as a PostgresSQL and Redis database.

$ ansible-playbook playbook.yml -i <your-host-here>, -u <remote-user> --extra-vars="mastodon_db_password=your-password mastodon_host=example.com"

The playbook is using become for some of its tasks, hence the user you connect to the instance with will have to have access to sudo. It should ask you for the password in due time.

Note: This assumes you're within the virtualenv already.

After you installed everything for the first time, you should run the mastodon setup wizard. This is only required once. After that the system will can be automatically updated with rerunning the Ansible script.

To run the wizard, follow these steps:

ssh yourmachine
su - mastodon
cd ~/live
RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake mastodon:setup

After that start the mastodon services with:

systemctl start mastodon-*.service

Roles

By default, the playbook runs all of the roles defined here in sequence. You can skip any of them by specifying --skip-tags=<role-name>.

Example

Skipping the postgres role:

$ ansible-playbook playbook.yml --skip-tags=postgres -i <your-host>, -u <your-user>

web

This role contains the following tasks:

• repositories.yml: Adds required package repositories to pull in the latest software (e.g. yarn, nodejs)
• packages.yml: Installs all the required packages for Mastodon to run (see vars/<distro>_vars.yml for a list)
• ruby.yml: Installs rbenv/ruby globally so you can run Mastodon (it's a Ruby on Rails app)
• user.yml: Adds a user to run Mastodon with since you shouldn't be running Mastodon under a privileged account.

Settings

config setting	explanation
mastodon_host	The url where your mastodon instance is reachable. E.g. example.social
disable_hsts	Per default the system will enable HSTS. You can set this to true if you want to disable it.

PostgresSQL

This role installs PostgresSQL, adds a database (named mastodon_development by default) and a user (named mastodon by default). For connecting to the database it can either use a local socket by setting the variable mastodon_db_login_unix_socket to the directory the Postgres socket lives in (/var/run/postgresql by default under Ubuntu 18.04) or a remote PostgreSQL instance you have installed somewhere else. You will than have to set the mastodon_db_login_host (IP address or hostname of database), mastodon_db_port (the port the database is accessible on; default 5432), mastodon_db_login_user (the administrative user to connect to the database with) and mastodon_db_login_password.

Settings

config setting	explanation
mastodon_db	The database name
mastodon_db_user	Database user for mastodon
mastodon_db_password	Database password for mastodon
mastodon_db_login_unix_socket	Unix socket of the local PostgresSQL instance (not needed when using remote connection)

If you configure your PostgresSQL on another server, you need to configure these settings additionally:

config setting	explanation
mastodon_db_login_host	Host of the PostgresSQL
mastodon_db_port	Port of the PostgresSQL
mastodon_db_login_user	Admin user to connect with
mastodon_db_login_password	Password of admin user

Examples

• Install PostgresSQL, create the database and user:

$ ansible-playbook playbook -i <your-host-here>, -u <remote-user> --extra-vars="mastodon_db_password=your-password mastodon_db_login_unix_socket='/var/run/postgresql'"

• PostgreSQL installed on host mastodob-db, create the database and the user:

$ ansible-playbook playbook -i <your-host-here>, -u <remote-user> --extra-vars="mastodon_db_password=your-password mastodon_db_login_host=mastodon-db mastodon_db_port=5432 mastodon_db_login_user=your-admin-db-user mastodon_db_login_password=your-password"

redis

This role installs the Redis key-value store, used by Mastodon, and its client libraries.

Docker

FIXME

Testing

Testing is done using ServerSpec. The tests are located in spec/. The tests are incorporating a rubocop run.

CircleCI

This repository is regularly running tests using CircleCI. Its configuration can be found in .circleci/config.yml.

Local testing

$ vagrant up bare|docker

This should provision a new instance within VirtualBox and run all the tests necessary to verify the Ansible playbook is valid. By default it runs the bare provisioning.

TODO

• Add letsencrypt
• Add CentOS/RedHat/Amazon Linux support
• Add LB role