Mastodon migration

[DidierMalenfant]

First post here. I'm about to do exactly this. I've setup a test mastodon app to play with it and simulate the steps of the migration. There are a few things that I can't do (I'm a developer but not a great web expert).

Migration requires stopping the mastodon server. On the Cloudron app I can't seem to use systemctl stop 'mastodon-*.service' as is says the server wasn't launched with systemd.

There are also a few tootctl commands I need to perform. Currently when I try to do even a simple /app/code/bin/tootctl --version I get the following warning:

/root is not writable.
Bundler will use `/tmp/bundler20250615-xxxx-xxxxxxxx' as your home directory temporarily.

Is this something I should worry about?

Thank for the help in advance. I can report my progress on here when I start doing the actual migration probably next week.

[sixguns]

Watching this, I set up a test Mastodon using Cloudron, works great compared to online tutorials I tried, but I plan to switch servers soon.

Now if only Cloudron would add other federation options yunohost has

[james]

@DidierMalenfant said in Mastodon migration:

Is this something I should worry about?

No. This is working as intended.
If you read the following doc section https://docs.cloudron.io/security/#app-isolation-and-sandboxing

Apps run with a read-only rootfs preventing attacks where the application code can be tampered with.

For this to work, some paths like /tmp and /run are read-write and can be used by the app but will not included in the backup.

[joseph]

@sixguns said in Mastodon migration:

Now if only Cloudron would add other federation options yunohost has

Am curious what you mean by this. Isn't federation a feature of mastodon? Or do you mean yunohost can toot somehow into fediverse from their UI?

[sixguns]

@joseph said in Mastodon migration:

what you mean

Lemmy, Iceshrimp, OSSN, other software options

[DidierMalenfant]

@James Thanks for your reply and clarifying behavior

What about stopping the mastodon service? Is that possible from the app's console on Cloudron?

[DidierMalenfant]

Ok it seems like 'Enable Recovery Mode' is the way to do this on Cloudron. I should then be able to replace the posgresql database with the one that is dumped from my masto.host server.

On the masto.host side I can generate a new backup from live data after stopping the server from the control panel and that will give me an option to also download the remote media cache and restore that too.

I'm told that I can generate the REDIS database from the PostgreSQL database after importing it over.

I also have to set a short TTL on my domain a couple of days before doing this so that the new IP gets picked up rapidly.

Is the folder organisation for the Mastodon app on Cloudron pretty much standard (for things like the cache, emojis, etc...)?

[james]

Hello @DidierMalenfant

@DidierMalenfant said in Mastodon migration:

Is the folder organisation for the Mastodon app on Cloudron pretty much standard (for things like the cache, emojis, etc...)?

Everything that you can edit and is saved on reboot is in /app/data/ everything outside of that will be overwritten on disabling the recovery mode or restarting the app or server as a whole.

Or did I understood your question wrong?

[DidierMalenfant]

@james said in Mastodon migration:

Or did I understood your question wrong?

No that was part of my question. Thank you!

The other part is, the masto.host backup has a folder structure with things like media/accounts/avatars or media/custom_emojis and I want to make sure that those things are in a similar location on the Cloudron install so I know where to copy everything over.

I'm going to do a trial run on a test Cloudron app anyway before I attempt to do it for real.