Mastodon - Federated social networking server

Mastodon <https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon>_ is a self-hosted social networking server built around ActivityPub. This TurnKey appliance scaffold is designed for contributing a new appliance repository to turnkeylinux-apps.

This repository follows the usual TurnKey layout:

• Makefile for product metadata and firewall ports.
• plan/main for extra Debian packages.
• conf.d/ for fully automated build-time installation.
• overlay/ for static files, systemd units, nginx config, inithooks, and backup overrides.

What this scaffold currently does

• creates a dedicated mastodon system user
• installs PostgreSQL, Redis, Nginx, Ruby build dependencies, Node toolchain prerequisites, ffmpeg, ImageMagick, and libvips
• clones Mastodon from upstream into /opt/mastodon/live
• installs Ruby with rbenv and JavaScript dependencies with corepack/Yarn
• seeds a production .env.production with placeholder values during build
• runs db:prepare and assets:precompile during build
• installs Nginx and systemd service templates
• includes a firstboot application hook to set domain/email/password and create the owner account

Important notes

This is a serious starter repository, but it is still a first pass. Before opening a PR upstream, I strongly recommend:

• building it in tkldev and validating a full non-interactive build
• pinning a specific Mastodon tag that is known-good for the target TurnKey release
• validating the exact Ruby/Node versions resolved from upstream on Debian 12/TurnKey 18
• testing firstboot both in ISO and LXC flows
• deciding whether to keep build-time secret generation or move more of it into firstboot
• reviewing whether a Confconsole Let's Encrypt plugin should be added, like GitLab does

Repository layout

::

.
├── .art/
├── conf.d/
├── overlay/
│   ├── etc/nginx/sites-available/mastodon
│   ├── etc/systemd/system/mastodon-*.service
│   ├── usr/lib/inithooks/bin/mastodon.py
│   └── usr/lib/inithooks/firstboot.d/40mastodon
├── Makefile
├── README.rst
├── changelog
└── plan/main

Suggested development flow

::

git clone https://github.com/turnkeylinux-apps/core.git mastodon
# replace with this repository contents

make CHROOT_ONLY=y
fab-chroot build/root.sandbox

# manually validate build assumptions inside the chroot
# then iterate on conf.d and overlay

deck -D build/root.sandbox
make clean
make

Potential next improvements

• add a Confconsole plugin for domain/Let's Encrypt integration
• add a tklweb-cp welcome page with Mastodon service status
• add logrotate overrides if required
• add a safer admin-password set path if tootctl behavior changes upstream
• add optional object storage/S3 firstboot questions later