Pleroma

Pleroma is a federated social networking platform, compatible with GNU social and other OStatus implementations. It is free software licensed under the AGPLv3.

It actually consists of two components: a backend, named simply Pleroma, and a user-facing frontend, named Pleroma-FE.

Its main advantages are its lightness and speed.

Pleromians trying to understand the memes

Features

Based on the elixir:alpine image
Ran as an unprivileged user
It works great

Sadly, this is not a reusable (e.g. I can't upload it to the Docker Hub), because for now Pleroma needs to compile the configuration. 😢 Thus you will need to build the image yourself, but I explain how to do it below.

Build-time variables

PLEROMA_VER : Pleroma version (latest commit of the develop branch by default)
GID: group id (default: 911)
UID: user id (default: 911)

Usage

Installation

Create a folder for your Pleroma instance. Inside, you should have Dockerfile and docker-compose.yml from this repo.

Here is the docker-compose.yml. You should change the POSTGRES_PASSWORD variable.

version: "3.8"

services:
  db:
    image: postgres:12.1-alpine
    container_name: pleroma_db
    restart: always
    environment:
      POSTGRES_USER: pleroma
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: ChangeMe!
      POSTGRES_DB: pleroma
    volumes:
      - ./postgres:/var/lib/postgresql/data

  web:
    image: pleroma
    container_name: pleroma_web
    restart: always
    ports:
      - "4000:4000"
    build:
      context: .
      # Feel free to remove or override this section
      # See 'Build-time variables' in README.md
      args:
        - "UID=911"
        - "GID=911"
        - "PLEROMA_VER=develop"
    volumes:
      - ./uploads:/var/lib/pleroma/uploads
      - ./static:/var/lib/pleroma/static
      - ./config.exs:/etc/pleroma/config.exs:ro
      # optional, see 'Config Override' section in README.md
      # - ./config-override.exs:/var/lib/pleroma/config.exs:ro
    environment:
      DOMAIN: example.com
      INSTANCE_NAME: Pleroma
      ADMIN_EMAIL: admin@example.com
      NOTIFY_EMAIL: notify@example.com
      DB_USER: pleroma
      DB_PASS: ChangeMe!
      DB_NAME: pleroma
    depends_on:
      - db

Create the upload and config folder and give write permissions for the uploads:

mkdir uploads config
chown -R 911:911 uploads

Pleroma needs the citext PostgreSQL extension, here is how to add it:

docker-compose up -d db
docker exec -i pleroma_db psql -U pleroma -c "CREATE EXTENSION IF NOT EXISTS citext;"
docker-compose down

Optionally configure Pleroma, see Config Override. You can now build the image. 2 way of doing it:

docker-compose build
# or
docker build -t pleroma .

I prefer the latter because it's more verbose but this will ignore any build-time variables you have set in docker-compose.yml.

You can now launch your instance:

docker-compose up -d

The initial creation of the database schema will be done automatically. Check if everything went well with:

docker logs -f pleroma_web

Make a new admin user using docker exec (replace fakeadmin with any username you'd like):

docker exec -it pleroma_web sh ./bin/pleroma_ctl user new fakeadmin admin@test.net --admin

You can now setup a Nginx reverse proxy in a container or on your host by using the example Nginx config.

Update

By default, the Dockerfile will be built from the latest commit of the develop branch as Pleroma does not have releases for now.

Thus to update, just rebuild your image and recreate your containers:

docker-compose pull # update the PostgreSQL if needed
docker-compose build .
# or
docker build -t pleroma .
docker-compose run --rm web mix ecto.migrate # migrate the database if needed
docker-compose up -d # recreate the containers if needed

If you want to run a specific commit, you can use the PLEROMA_VER variable:

docker build -t pleroma . --build-arg PLEROMA_VER=develop # a branch
docker build -t pleroma . --build-arg PLEROMA_VER=a9203ab3 # a commit
docker build -t pleroma . --build-arg PLEROMA_VER=v2.0.7 # a version

a9203ab3 being the hash of the commit. (They're here)

This value can also be set through docker-compose.yml as seen in the example file provided in this repository.

Config Override

By default the provided docker-compose.yml file mounts config.exs in the Pleroma container, this file is a dynamic configuration that sources some values from the environment variables provided to the container (variables like ADMIN_EMAIL etc.).

For those that want to change configuration that is not exposed through environment variables there is the option to mount the config-override.exs file which can than be modified to your satisfaction. Values set in this file will override anything set in config.exs. The override file provided in this repository disables new registrations on your instance, as an example.

Other Docker images

Here are other Pleroma Docker images that helped me build mine:

jkjoy/docker-pleroma