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pixelfed/docker/new-server.md

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New Pixelfed + Docker + Docker Compose server

This guide will help you install and run Pixelfed on your server using Docker Compose.

Prerequisites

Recommendations and requirements for hardware and software needed to run Pixelfed using Docker Compose.

It's highly recommended that you have some experience with Linux (e.g. Ubuntu or Debian), SSH, and lightweight server administration.

Server

A VPS or dedicated server you can SSH into, for example

Hardware

Hardware requirements depends on the amount of users you have (or plan to have), and how active they are.

A safe starter/small instance hardware for 25 users and blow are:

  • CPU/vCPU 2 cores.
  • RAM 2-4 GB as your instance grow, memory requirements will increase for the database.
  • Storage 20-50 GB HDD is fine, but ideally SSD or NVMe, especially for the database.
  • Network 100 Mbit/s or faster.

Domain and DNS

  • A Domain (or subdomain) is needed for the Pixelfed server (for example, pixelfed.social or pixelfed.mydomain.com)
  • Having the required A/CNAME DNS records for your domain (above) pointing to your server.
    • Typically an A record for the root (sometimes shown as @) record for mydomain.com.
    • Possibly an A record for www. subdomain as well.

Network

  • Port 80 (HTTP) and 443 (HTTPS) ports forwarded to the server.
    • Example for Ubuntu using ufw for port 80: ufw allow 80
    • Example for Ubuntu using ufw for port 443: ufw allow 443

Optional

  • An Email/SMTP provider for sending e-mails to your users, such as e-mail confirmation and notifications.
  • An Object Storage provider for storing all images remotely, rather than locally on your server.

E-mail / SMTP provider

NOTE: If you don't plan to use en e-mail/SMTP provider, then make sure to set ENFORCE_EMAIL_VERIFICATION="false" in your .env file!

There are many providers out there, with wildly different pricing structures, features, and reliability.

It's beyond the cope of this document to detail which provider to pick, or how to correctly configure them, but some providers that is known to be working well - with generous free tiers and affordable packages - are included for your convince (in no particular order) below:

  • Simple Email Service (SES) by Amazon Web Services (AWS) is pay-as-you-go with a cost of $0.10/1000 emails.
  • Brevo (formerly SendInBlue) has a Free Tier with 300 emails/day.
  • Postmark has a Free Tier with 100 emails/month.
  • Forward Email has a $3/mo/domain plan with both sending and receiving included.
  • Mailtrap has a 1000 emails/month free-tier (their Email Sending product, not the Email Testing one).

Object Storage

NOTE: This is entirely optional - by default Pixelfed will store all uploads (videos, images, etc.) directly on your servers storage.

Object storage is a technology that stores and manages data in an unstructured format called objects. Modern organizations create and analyze large volumes of unstructured data such as photos, videos, email, web pages, sensor data, and audio files

-- What is object storage? by Amazon Web Services

It's beyond the cope of this document to detail which provider to pick, or how to correctly configure them, but some providers that is known to be working well - with generous free tiers and affordable packages - are included for your convince (in no particular order) below:

Software

Required software to be installed on your server

Getting things ready

Connect via SSH to your server and decide where you want to install Pixelfed.

In this guide I'm going to assume it will be installed at /data/pixelfed.

  1. Install required software as mentioned in the Software Prerequisites section above
  2. Create the parent directory by running mkdir -p /data
  3. Clone the Pixelfed repository by running git clone https://github.com/pixelfed/pixelfed.git /data/pixelfed
  4. Change to the Pixelfed directory by running cd /data/pixelfed

Modifying your settings (.env file)

Copy the example configuration file

Pixelfed contains a default configuration file (.env.docker) you should use as a starter, however, before editing anything, make a copy of it and put it in the right place (.env).

Run the following command to copy the file: cp .env.docker .env

Modifying the configuration file

The configuration file is quite long, but the good news is that you can ignore most of it, most of the server-specific settings are configured for you out of the box.

The minimum required settings you must change is:

  • (required) APP_DOMAIN which is the hostname you plan to run your Pixelfed server on (e.g. pixelfed.social) - must not include http:// or a trailing slash (/)!
  • (required) DB_PASSWORD which is the database password, you can use a service like pwgen.io to generate a secure one.
  • (optional) ENFORCE_EMAIL_VERIFICATION should be set to "false" if you don't plan to send emails.
  • (optional) MAIL_DRIVER and related MAIL_* settings if you plan to use an email/SMTP provider - See Email variables documentation.
  • (optional) PF_ENABLE_CLOUD / FILESYSTEM_CLOUD if you plan to use an Object Storage provider.

See the Configure environment variables documentation for details!

You need to mainly focus on following sections

You can skip the following sections, since they are already configured/automated for you:

  • Redis
  • Database (except for DB_PASSWORD)
  • One-time setup tasks

Starting the service

With everything in place and (hopefully) well-configured, we can now go ahead and start our services by running

docker compose up -d

This will download all the required Docker images, start the containers, and being the automatic setup.

You can follow the logs by running docker compose logs - you might want to scroll to the top to logs from the start.

You can use the CLI flag --tail=100 to only see the most recent (100 in this example) log lines for each container.

You can use the CLI flag --follow to continue to see log output from the containers.

You can combine --tail=100 and --follow like this docker compose logs --tail=100 --follow.

If you only care about specific contaieners, you can add them to the end of the command like this docker compose logs web worker proxy.