Mastodon/tech

This page is a seed article. You can help HTYP water it: make a request to expand a given page and/or donate to help give us more writing-hours!

At this point, I'm still skimming useful tidbits as I learn the system. -- Woozle

Pages

• API
• files

About

Mastodon consists of multiple components, including:

• the Mastodon application software (mainly Ruby and JavaScript)
• ...which runs under Ruby on Rails
• redis, an "in-memory database server" aka "dictionary" (see Wikipedia)
• Yarn, an application package manager for Node.js
• PostgreSQL - SQL database
• a web server - typically nginx, but Apache also works
• Node.js
• Ruby - language used for most server-side operations
  • Bundler - application package manager for Ruby, packaged as a Ruby Gem
  • Ruby on Rails - application framework
• utilities:
  • ffmpeg - for conversion of GIFs to MP4s
  • imagemagick - for the usual purposes

Files

• application: typically /home/<mastodon_user>/<mastodon> - but really, anywhere under the Mastodon user's home folder should work
  • /home/<mastodon_user>/live/.env.production: main config file (for stuff not covered by UI)
• PostgreSQL logs (usually in /var/log/postgresql)

Local Notes

• Woozle attempts to install Mastodon, several times