roobre / mastodon-chart

Helm chart for Mastodon deployment in Kubernetes

Introduction

This is a Helm chart for installing Mastodon into a Kubernetes cluster. The basic usage is:

1. edit values.yaml or create a separate yaml file for custom values
2. helm dep update
3. helm install --namespace mastodon --create-namespace my-mastodon ./ -f path/to/additional/values.yaml

This chart is tested with k8s 1.21+ and helm 3.6.0+.

Installation

This chart is released as an OCI image to ghcr.io/mastodon/charts/mastodon. You can install it without the need to add any repository to your helm installation using:

helm install mastodon oci://ghcr.io/mastodon/charts/mastodon --values your-values-file.yaml

You can also add it as a dependency to another chart in your Chart.yaml:

dependencies:
  - name: mastodon
    version: 4.0.0
    repository: oci://ghcr.io/mastodon/charts

Configuration

The variables that must be configured are:

• password and keys in the mastodon.secrets, postgresql, and redis groups; if left blank, some of those values will be autogenerated, but will not persist across upgrades.

• SMTP settings for your mailer in the mastodon.smtp group.

If your PersistentVolumeClaim is ReadWriteOnce and you're unable to use a S3-compatible service or run a self-hosted compatible service like Minio then you need to set the pod affinity so the web and sidekiq pods are scheduled to the same node.

Example configuration:

podAffinity:
  requiredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution:
    - labelSelector:
        matchExpressions:
          - key: app.kubernetes.io/part-of
            operator: In
            values:
              - rails
      topologyKey: kubernetes.io/hostname

Administration

You can run admin CLI commands in the web deployment.

kubectl -n mastodon exec -it deployment/mastodon-web -- bash
tootctl accounts modify admin --reset-password

or

kubectl -n mastodon exec -it deployment/mastodon-web -- tootctl accounts modify admin --reset-password

Missing features

Currently this chart does not support:

• Hidden services
• Swift

Upgrading

Because database migrations are managed as a Job separate from the Rails and Sidekiq deployments, it’s possible they will occur in the wrong order. After upgrading Mastodon versions, it may sometimes be necessary to manually delete the Rails and Sidekiq pods so that they are recreated against the latest migration.