Jim beat me to blogging it, but on Friday he and I jumped on a stream and migrated a test instance of Mastodon he has that he installed the manual way, over to a new dockerized install using my 1-click installer on Reclaim Cloud.
Things went super smoothly and this should make future upgrades and maintenance super painless. Because the server uses an S3 bucket for its images, really all we needed to do was dump and restore the database, and then fill out the .env file that had settings for Mail and S3. I found most of what I needed to know about the database side e of things from this doc:
Migrating to a new machine - Mastodon documentation
And here are the notes I was taking while we were on stream:\
Notes
Update .env file
Look at the install’s env.production file and port over any necessary settings in to /root/mastodon/.env
dump the database
su mastodon
pg_dump -Fc mastodon_production -f backup.dump
upload backup.dump to new mastodon install
Just use the file manager if its small, otherwise rsync or sftp.
copy file into db container
docker cp backup.dump postgres:/backup.dump
get a shell inside the database container
docker exec -it postgres bash
make a database
createdb -U mastoson -T template0 mastodon_production
-U mastodon will tell postgres to use the mastodon role, instead of the root role.
restore the database
pg_restore -Fc -U mastodon -n public --no-owner --role=mastodon -d mastodon_production /backup.dump
exit out of postgres container and restart all the containers
exit
docker-compose down && docker-compose up -d && docker-compose logs -f
Things should be working! Now all we need to do is drop the extra db.
go back in to the postgres container and drop db
We don’t need the original database that the installer made, which was called mastodon anymore.
docker exec -it postgres bash
dropdb -U mastodon mastodon