oh btw you can probably run mastodon entirely on one of those 4GB raspberry pis now, so total cost comes out to
$55 - raspberry pi
$8 - wall adapter
$10 - micro SD
$25 - 120GB Solid State
$10 - external SSD enclosure
---------------------------------------------
$108
but it's a 1-time payment, unlike renting a VPS from a cloud provider.
@asonix would you happen to have links to directions and softwre to do this?
long, instructions, 1/?
I do not, but the general idea would be:
1. Flash the SD card with Raspbian Lite (the offical image)
2. Generate SSH Keys and put the public key in /home/pi/.ssh/authorized_keys on the SD card
3. create an empty file at /boot/ssh on the SD card
4. plug everything in
5. ssh into the pi
6. create a user called mastodon
7. format the external drive as ext4 or btrfs or whatever you like
8. mount the external drive to /mastodon/
long, instructions, 2/?
9. change ownership of /mastodon to the mastodon user
10. install rbenv (instructions on github) as the mastodon user
11. install nodenv (instructions on github) as the mastodon user
12. use rbenv to install ruby 2.6.1
13. use nodenv to install node 11.14.0
14. install yarn with npm
15. clone the mastodon repository into /mastodon/live
long, instructions, 3/?
16. install postgres
17. edit the postgres config to point to /mastodon/postgres
18. move the original postgres db folder to /mastodon/postgres
19. follow the mastodon setup instructions on https://docs.joinmastodon.org
long, instructions, 4/4
that's basically it tbh
