mastodon-installer

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

Prerequisites for running the playbook

• Ansible

for testing purposes:

• Vagrant >= 1.9.3

Running the playbooks

This playbook is intended to be run on a remote 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="<extra-variables>"

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.

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)
• installers.yml: Installs all the required packages for Mastodon to run
• 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 priviledged account.

postgres

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 16.04) 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.

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.

Local testing

$ vagrant up

This should provision a new instance within VirtualBox and run all the tests necessary to verify the Ansible playbook is valid.

TODO

• Add LB role