mastodon-utils/README.md

🦣 Mastodon utilities

Random opinionated helper scripts & front-end customizations for my personal Mastodon instance (running on glitch-soc). You definitely don't want to use any of this as-is — check out my more general purpose mastodon-installer scripts instead.

Notes

The wiki of this repo and the /etc folder are simply my way of not forgetting how I did something, which I do quite a bit. Refer there for random notes on PgBouncer, Grafana, etc. but DO NOT BLINDLY COPY & PASTE anything there without doing your own research!

• Grafana & Prometheus
• ElasticSearch
• PgBouncer
• Brotli compression

Usage

AGAIN, DEFINITELY DO NOT JUST RUN THIS IF YOU'RE NOT ME!!! 😊

This sets up the bare minimum customizations after Mastodon is installed:

git clone https://github.com/jakejarvis/mastodon-utils.git /home/mastodon/utils && cd /home/mastodon/utils

# setup nginx using conf files from this repo:
./scripts/setup_nginx.sh

# back up Postgres, Redis, and secrets:
./scripts/backup.sh

# pull latest Mastodon (vanilla or glitch-soc) and apply patches from this repo:
./scripts/upgrade.sh

# cherry-pick everything else below...

Scripts

• init.sh: A small helper that runs at the very beginning of each script below to initialize rbenv and set consistent environment variables.
  • Optional: To make your life easier, you can also source this script from the .bashrc of the mastodon user and/or whichever user you regularly SSH in as:

if [ -f /home/mastodon/utils/init.sh ]; then
  . /home/mastodon/utils/init.sh
fi

• apply_patches.sh: Dangerously applies every patch listed below, and automatically detects if glitch-soc patches should also be applied
• backup.sh: Backs up Postgres, Redis, and .env.production secrets to a .tar.gz file in /home/mastodon/backups — useful for a periodic cronjob
• setup_nginx.sh: Sets up symlinks from /etc/nginx to nginx confs in this repo
• upgrade.sh: Upgrades Mastodon server (latest version if vanilla Mastodon, latest commit if glitch-soc) and re-applies patches listed below
• version.sh: Tests init.sh by printing Mastodon, Ruby, and rbenv versions.
• weekly_cleanup.sh: Runs Mastodon's built-in cleanup commands, designed for a weekly cronjob
  • Keeps 7 days of media (in object storage)
  • Keeps 90 days of generated preview cards

Patches

Vanilla and glitch-soc:

• robots.patch: Disallow search engines for all of Mastodon
• increase-sidekiq-timeout.patch: Small bump in Sidekiq's timeout before it decides a remote instance isn't available. Use this one very carefully!
• favicons.patch: Use custom icon images instead of Mastodon logo
• system-font.patch: Use the system's default sans-serif font stack instead of Roboto
  • glitch/system-font.patch
• hide-contact-email.patch: Hides the mailto: link on the About page
  • glitch/hide-contact-email.patch
• hide-rules.patch: Applies just to homepage, meant only for single-user instances
  • glitch/hide-rules.patch
• hide-signup.patch: Hide the "create account" button (for aesthetics, not security!)
  • glitch/hide-signup.patch

glitch-soc only:

• custom-glitch-defaults.patch: Sets default Glitch appearance settings for logged-out users
• remove-glitch-cruft.patch: Removes a bunch of junk no longer used by glitch-soc
• sidebar-logo.patch: Restore Mastodon logo in logged-out sidebar

License

MIT