Errors with "rake" command.

[jacksaturn]

Thank you for this guide — it was extremely straightforward and got my Mastodon instance up and running a lot quicker than expected! (I already had Docker and NPM set up, so it was just a matter of working through the rest.)

I did run into one hiccup while running the various commands, specifically the sudo docker compose run --rm web bundle exec rake secret command to create the entry for PAPERCLIP_SECRET. An error message was returned. After doing some quick searching online, a forum post about a similar error indicated that substituting rails in the place of rake would allow the command to run, which it did.

Thanks again!

[EasternPA]

Updated, thank you! I forgot all about this. What about the earlier rake command? Does that still work as written?

Thanks again.

[jacksaturn]

The earlier command seemed to work fine and I didn't get an error.

Oh, and one other suggestion might be to put a "last updated" date toward the top of the instructions page. I wasn't sure how long ago your instructions were updated, but after comparing them to other instructions online, I figured I'd take a chance. At least as of May 2026, it worked out!

[EasternPA]

Done. But I can't guarantee I will remember to update that in the future! :)

Thanks for reaching out. I've been meaning to self-host since I can't get a free droplet anymore. Are you self-hosting at home? Do you have a .well-known you can suggest to help with federation?

[jacksaturn]

I'm running it in Docker on a self-hosted Proxmox server, without absolute assurance it's going to work. But I'm hopeful!

Just finished configuring everything within the GUI, so figuring out how to federate is my next step. My understanding has been that it's a matter of following users on other servers, which will start to make connections with those other instances. As a test, I just followed someone on mastodon.social, then went to mastodon.social and searched for my username there — it successfully found my new self-hosted account. 👍

If there's something more direct than that which I can do, I'm not sure, but I'd be interested to know. I'm familiar with creating a ./well-known webfinger for various purposes, and I'm going to experiment with that to see if it helps in visibility. But are you referring to another method?

[EasternPA]

I was confused about the federation port; you're all set here. It's Matrix that runs federation on 8448 and needs a .well-known to redirect federation connections.

[BJReplay]

Chiming in here (not on federation, sorry), just on the instructions: I followed this a couple of years ago (Oracle Cloud Free) and it worked well then.

Since then, the ability to expand toots above 500 characters got harder and harder, to the point that I couldn't get it to work around about Mastodon 4.4-ish, so I switched to glitch-soc instead: ghcr.io/glitch-soc/mastodon:latest in the docker-compose (https://glitch-soc.github.io/docs/)

[jacksaturn]

@BJReplay Out of curiosity, were you able to switch to the glitch-soc image without losing any of your data? I set up my instance using the default Mastodon image, but I'm interested in doing a fair bit of customization, so I might want to switch to another at some point.

[BJReplay]

Out of curiosity, were you able to switch to the glitch-soc image without losing any of your data?

Yes, @jacksaturn - I had a backup, but switching was straightforward. I'm running docker rather than native but switching the images - both mastodon and streaming was pretty much it. It was a while ago, and I did read a few guides (sorry, don't have any saved).

[EasternPA]

Since then, the ability to expand toots above 500 characters got harder and harder, to the point that I couldn't get it to work

Thanks for jumping in and letting us know, @jacksaturn . Now that some time has passed, I was able to ask Gemini for a docker compose for an all-in-one console that is pretty close to a Fediverse app store. I shut my instance down years ago and mistakenly deleted my Oracle Always Free instance. I've never been able to create one again. Even on arm, as I wrote in the instructions.