It is recommended to create a special user for mastodon on the server (you could call the user `mastodon`), though remember to disable outside login for it. You should only be able to get into that user through `sudo su - mastodon`.
It is recommended to use rbenv (exclusively from the `mastodon` user) to install the desired Ruby version. Follow the guides to [install rbenv][1] and [rbenv-build][2] (I recommend checking the [prerequisites][3] for your system on the rbenv-build project and installing them beforehand, obviously outside the unprivileged `mastodon` user)
Then once `rbenv` is ready, run `rbenv install 2.3.1` to install the Ruby version for Mastodon.
## Git
You need the `git-core` package installed on your system. If it is so, from the `mastodon` user:
cd ~
git clone https://github.com/Gargron/mastodon.git live
cd live
Then you can proceed to install project dependencies:
gem install bundler
bundle install --deployment --without development test
yarn install
## Configuration
Then you have to configure your instance:
cp .env.production.sample .env.production
nano .env.production
Fill in the important data, like host/port of the redis database, host/port/username/password of the postgres database, your domain name, SMTP details (e.g. from Mailgun or equivalent transactional e-mail service, many have free tiers), whether you intend to use SSL, etc. If you need to generate secrets, you can use:
To get a random string. If you are setting up on one single server (most likely), then REDIS_HOST is localhost and `DB_HOST` is `/var/run/postgresql`, `DB_USER` is `mastodon` and `DB_NAME` is `mastodon_production` while `DB_PASS` is empty because this setup will use the ident authentication method (system user "mastodon" maps to postgres user "mastodon").
This allows you to `sudo systemctl enable /etc/systemd/system/mastodon-*.service` and `sudo systemctl start mastodon-web.service mastodon-sidekiq.service mastodon-streaming.service` to get things going.
You may want to run `which bundle` first and copypaste that full path instead of simply `bundle` in the above commands because cronjobs usually don't have all the paths set. The time and intervals of when to run these jobs are up to you, but once every day should be enough for all.
Depending on which files changed, e.g. if anything in the `/db/` or `/app/assets` directory changed, respectively. Also, Mastodon runs in memory, so you need to restart it before you see any changes. If you're using systemd, that would be: