Playbook to set up Mastodon on RHEL/CentOS.

• Ansible 2.2 or higher

• SELinux (i.e., not a Linode or Vultr VM)

This playbook assumes you already have a server (that you can SSH into as root) and a domain name pointing at it, and that you want a new Let’s Encrypt certificate for the domain.

Edit inventory and set ansible_ssh_host to your domain.

ansible-galaxy install --roles-path roles -r roles/requirements.yml
ansible-playbook -i inventory toot.yml

• You’ll be prompted for the path the public key that you want installed on the server at /home/mastodon/.ssh/authorized_keys.

• You’ll be prompted for a password for the “mastodon” user.

• You’ll be prompted for SMTP settings; the defaults are for SparkPost.

After it finishes you can deploy using Capistrano.

After reboot, when SELinux is enabled, you’ll need to run the post-deploy.yml playbook to configure SELinux correctly:

ansible-playbook -i inventory followup.yml -b -K

Like me you might be used to redirecting traffic from the naked domain to www. That won’t work here, since several of the API clients involved in federation do not follow redirects. If you try to 301 all your traffic from https://hello.cat to https://www.hello.cat, federation will not work. Nor will trying to log into a Mastodon client like Amaroq using hello.cat as the name of your instance.