Hosting Mastodon on latest Oracle Cloud free powerful ARM instance

Currently this repo is updated to use Mastodon v3.4.1 and corresponding Elasticsearch v7.10.1

Create instance

1. Go to page https://cloud.oracle.com/compute/instances/create
2. Fill in instance name, such as mastodon
3. Edit Image and shape, make sure to choose VM.Standard.A1.Flex with the CPU cores and memory size you need, max 4 cores and 24G memory
4. Edit Image and shape, make sure to choose the right image, support both Oracle Linux as well as Ubuntu none minimal version. In this guide, assumption Ubuntu is used
5. Double check step 3 and 4, as sometimes updating one of them will automatically change another's settings, making sure you have chosen the right image and shape
6. (Optional) Tick Specify a custom boot volume size, and enter volume size, maximum 200G, or leave it as it is and create a data volume later
7. Click on Create

Connect to the instance

Use your common SSH method to connect to your instance. You can find the public IP address by going to https://cloud.oracle.com/compute/instances and choose the instance you have just created. In the details page, you will see you public IP address on the right hand side.

Install Docker

1. Following the official guide at https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/ubuntu/, make sure to choose arm64 during the process.
2. Download the latest v2 docker compose CLI at https://github.com/docker/compose-cli#compose-v2-aka-local-docker-compose, after that run docker compose to make sure it is working

Install Mastodon

1. Clone this repo, git clone https://github.com/xmflsct/oracle-arm-mastodon.git
2. Go into mastodon folder and clone the Mastodon repo, cd mastodon and git clone https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon.git
3. Checkout to latest version of Mastodon, git checkout tags/v3.4.1
4. To use full-text search and optimising for Chinese content, follow instructions of how to update source code before building the docker image
5. Go back to the root folder by cd ..
6. Update ./caddy/Caddyfile to your domain name. Before Caddy can request for SSL certificates successfully, make sure your domain is not behind Cloudflare or such at this moment
7. Run docker compose build
8. If build is successful, you can run docker compose up -d now!