Provisions, builds, and configures a full Mastodon server, with all the trimmings.

There's a lot of rote work involved in setting up a Mastodon server, and this simplifies things a lot.

THIS IS NOT YET READY FOR PRODUCTION USE! But it's getting close!

What does it do?

It configures...

• A server in AWS EC2
• DNS zone data at AWS Route53 as well as nameserver configuration at the registrar
• SES to deliver outbound mail, setting everything up to verify your domain
• SSH keys for the instance, and AWS SSM to manage SSH connections without having to open port 22
• nginx reverse proxy
• certbot to manage TLS certificates automatically
• an S3 bucket for media storage
• Mastodon
• fediblockhole to auto-block bad servers by default
• Probably some other stuff I'm forgetting

Requirements

• GNU Make
• Ansible
• Terraform
• AWS CLI
• AWS SessionManager plugin (http://docs.aws.amazon.com/console/systems-manager/session-manager-plugin-not-found)
• Python 3.6+ for credentials
• python3-bs4 (BeautifulSoup 4)

Setup

You need a working set of AWS credentials to set up the server. Head to aws.amazon.com and click the sign-up button. AWS is a paid service and you will be charged for the resources this sets up.

• ./configure and answer the questions it asks you
• make

Once SES is configured, you need to manually go to the AWS console and request that your account be moved from the sandbox to production, before it will deliver mail.

At present the server it configures will not be open to the public. A step will be added soon to move your server into "production" and open the port up once you're satisfied with it.

Additional usage

make ssh to initiate an SSH connection to the server

make reboot does what it says on the tin

Roadmap

Some missing features:

• postfix inbound to relay main from SES back to the administrator
• SMTP and IMAP services for users: postfix/dovecot/rspamd/pigeonhole! Maybe!
• Support for migrating Mastodon to newer versions, including database upgrades
• AWS Secrets Manager support for various credentials
• Phanpy
• Synapse and Element
• Backups! (ha!)
• Vagrant and existing-server support for people not wanting to use AWS
• ActivityPub relay subscription (if desired)

Other work that still needs doing:

• Converting from docker to podman
• non-root access for Ansible
• A more configurable server topology with HA and autoscaling for larger sites