Migrating from Mastodon or Glitch

⚠️	This page is a work in progress; feel free to edit, but please do not try this on production instances

Disclaimers

This procedure is based on Mastodon and Glitch-soc documentation. It has been used successfully at least twice on instance https://fedi.lewactwo.pl.

The procedure has been used to successfully migrate a YunoHost-based instance from Glitch-soc to Ecko version 2021.12.09~ynh1. However, there is no good reason why it wouldn't work in other environments with slight modifications.

YunoHost-based instance

Preparation

Before the migration make sure that you have backed up all the necessary components of your instance. In case of YunoHost powered servers, backup requires only one command:

sudo yunohost backup --apps mastodon

Or for Glitch-soc

sudo yunohost backup --apps glitchsoc

Once you secure app backup - in case of migration failure - you can proceed exporting data from your old node. For migration to work fully, you need three essential items:

• application environment config
• database contents
• site media

Be advised: Almost all the commands below require you to have sudo access!
To get them, first you have to go to your app location (cd /var/www/mastodon/live/ on YunoHost). If you use Glitch, replace mastodon with glitchsoc.

Once you are there, copy the .env.production file somewhere safe - it contains lots of static configuration options, as well as your LDAP config.

Next we'll export the media files, but first we should clean them up. Because Mastodon (and many other Fediverse nodes) copies a lot of federated content locally, your media storage can grow quickly to a large size.

Of course there is no need for us to export all the external media before migration, so we will save some time and disk space by trimming it beforehand. From your app directory execute the command

RAILS_ENV=production ./bin/tootctl media remove

Once this is done you can copy your ./public/system directory, which contains all the media (now only local files uploaded directly to your instance) to some secure location; it seems logical to use the same location that you put the environment config before. rsync -avz --progress --partial works well for this purpose.

Last thing to do is to make a full backup of your postgresql database. You can do it running

pg_dump mastodon_production -U postgres -f <your_backup_location/filename.psql>

Now that we have a complete backup, we're ready to Remove old instance

Install Ecko

Clean defaults

Import data

Finalize migration

Test