↓Chase to main content
  1. 2025/
  2. 🥩 Licks, Barks, Howls n Growls from 🐕 April/

Mastodon Progress

Getting the hang of running a Mastodon Server

Day 2 Administration #

As y’all know, We’ve been working on setting up our fediverse presense.
Because I’m something of a glutton for technical punishment, I opted to run the infra for our services.
Resultantly, as I sand down some of the rough edges of curating a mastodon host I’ve gotten some cuts, scrapes, and bruises to show for it.
Don’t get me wrong… The product is pretty well put together…. I’m in the process of writing up a doc on how we’re managing it all. Stay tuned.

but nevertheless, There’ve been a few lessons learned.

Routine Maintenance #

We update our Mastodon container regularly from the upstream source .

This occasionally brings in a need to perform some system maintenance.

For example:

Pending Database Migrations #

This message in the /admin/dashboard Administration Dashboard really isn’t all that helpful:

There are pending database migrations. Please run them to ensure the application behaves as expected

🧐

If one searches around on the internet, one can find some guidance on how to make this go, and it’s actually fairly straight-forward.

The commands to perform the maintanenace should be done from within the context of the web resource.

If you are running Mastodon via docker compose:

docker compose exec -e "RAILS_ENV=production" -e "RUBYOPT=-W0" web "bundle" "exec" "rails" "db:migrate"

Thoughts about the process #

This wasn’t hard, but discerning what needed to be done was not as obvious as it coulda been.

This AUGHT be someplace in the docs, but if it is, I’ve not found it.