GoToSocial Install Notes

Along with building Akkoma instances (build notes here) and Mastodon instances, I have been playing around with GoToSocial. GoToSocial is a project I am watching because it is easy to install, doesn’t use much in terms of system resources and doesn’t require PostgreSQL (though it is an option) as it can use SQLite. The project is alpha right now, but it is quite usable. There is no front-end UI for anything except modifying your profile and displaying your profile to visitors – which is fine since there are great clients out there.

The installation instructions work great, they are generic enough to allow people to have flexibility to their installs – for instance using nginx, Apache or Caddy 2 to be a reverse proxy.

These are my notes from installing GoToSocial a few times with very specific build specs. Specifically, I’m using Ubuntu as the OS, nginx as the reverse proxy and Cloudflare as a CDN. The Cloudflare part only changes how I do SSL certs, if you’re not using Cloudflare, the certbot instructions in the official docs work great.

nginx

Instead of installing GoToSocial first, I start out with nginx as it’ll make testing the instance easier.

apt install nginx

Create a configuration file for your host /etc/nginx/sites-available/gotosocial.conf

I incorporated the changes suggested by the official documenation to have nginx serve static assets. Although GoToSocial will gladly serve static assets, it’s more efficient (and faster) if nginx does it. There are two static assets paths: /assets and /filesystem. /assets has assets for the web UI. /filesystem has post attachments (and avatars).

You’ll need to know the location of these two paths on the OS filesystem for the nginx configuration. If you’re installing based on the official documentation then the nginx configuration below will work for serving these static assets without changes to the settings for the two paths.

If you have changed where you installed GoToSocial, the location of these two paths are in your installation directory:

  • /assets is located in /INSTALL_DIR/web/assets/
  • /filesystem is located in /INSTALL_DIR/storage/

Change YOUR.HOST.TLD to the hostname for your instance. Change YOUR_SSL_CERT and YOUR_SSL_PRIVATE_KEY to point to the files for the respective things.

2/16/2023: The section for the location /fileserver/ is commented out because if that is active in nginx, gotosocial does not refetch media that has been purged when the media retention purge job runs. I had my instance set to purge media after two days. What I found was that after two days, people that I follow or have followed me more than two days ago were missing their avatars and backgrounds as they had been removed from the filesystem. Because nginx is proxying the media connection, gotosocial doesn’t know to go refetch that media.

server {
  server_name YOUR.HOST.TLD;

  location /assets/ {
    alias /gotosocial/web/assets/;
    autoindex off;
    expires 7d;
    add_header Cache-Control "public";
  }

  #location /fileserver/ {
  #  alias /gotosocial/storage/;
  #  autoindex off;
  #  expires max;
  #  add_header Cache-Control "public, immutable";
  #}

  location / {
    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080/;
    proxy_set_header Host $host;
    proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
    proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
  }
  client_max_body_size 40M;

  listen 443 ssl;
  ssl_certificate /etc/ssl/certs/YOUR_SSL_CERT;
  ssl_certificate_key /etc/ssl/private/YOUR_SSL_PRIVATE_KEY;
}

server {
  if ($host = YOUR.HOST.TLD) {
      return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
  }

  listen 80;
  listen [::]:80;
  server_name YOUR.HOST.TLD;
    return 404;
}

Enable the nginx configuration:

ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/gotosocial.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/gotosocial.conf

Check that all is good:

nginx -t

If it’s good, restart nginx:

systemctl restart nginx

GoToSocial

Now install GoToSocial based on the official install documentation. The instructions are super clear, concise and will get GoToSocial installed without hassle.

If you’re running GoToSocial as a single-user instance, don’t forget to flip this setting to false:

accounts-registration-open: false

When you get to the “[Optional] Enable the systemd service”, there’s one minor tweak. Since we are using a reverse proxy, you’ll want to uncomment this line in /etc/systemd/system/gotosocial.service.

AmbientCapabilities=CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE

Admin and Custom Emojis

GoToSocial doesn’t have the admin interface installed by default. It can be installed if you wish using the instructions here, but I found it easier to use the one that GoToSocial provides.

The admin panel that you can use for your instance by signing in is located here.

Make sure you have your user promoted as an admin to be able to use the admin interface.

./gotosocial --config-path ./config.yaml admin account promote --username YOUR_USERNAME

The admin interface provided a couple of things that I couldn’t do via the command-line tool or configuration file:

  • Change the name of my instance.
  • Add a description of my instance.
  • Add a contact for my instance.
  • Add custom emojis (this is important)
  • Block naughty instances.
  • Manually purge remote media.

That’s it!