Guide¶
If anything is confusing, unclear, missing, or maybe even wrong on this page, then please let us know by submitting a bug report 
Connect via SSH to your server and decide where you want to install Pixelfed.
Info
In this guide, I will assume you will install Pixelfed in /data/pixelfed and that the Docker Prerequisites are met.
You can change the installation path; update the commands below to fit your setup.
Initial set up¶
Create the directory¶
Clone the Pixelfed project¶
Change directory¶
Check system requirements¶
The scripts/ directory has a bunch of useful helper tools, and the first one we will use is one to help check if the server and software are meeting (some) of the requirements.
Run the following command and follow the instructions (if any) on how to resolve the issues detected.
Configuration (Quick Start)¶
The settings file (.env) is quite large (+1.000 lines) and while most of it is documentation, and not configuration, it can still be quite daunting to read through early on in your Pixelfed journey.
Instead, let's run the included setup script that will guide us through the required (and most commonly changed) settings.
You can run this script many times, it will remember your previous answers since they are read from, and written to, the .env configuration file
Configuration (Manual)¶
Copy the example file¶
If you used the Quick Start, skip this step, otherwise your changes will be lost
Pixelfed contains a default configuration file (.env.docker) you should use as a starter; however, before editing anything, make a copy of it and put it in the right place (.env).
Run the following command to copy the file:
Modify config file¶
If you used the Quick Start, some of these steps have already been made for you
The configuration file is quite long, but the good news is that you can ignore most of it; most of the server-specific settings are configured for you out of the box.
The minimum required settings you must change is:
- (required)
APP_DOMAIN, which is the hostname you plan to run your Pixelfed server on (e.g.,pixelfed.social) - must not includehttp://or a trailing slash (/)! - (required)
DB_PASSWORD, which is the database password; you can use a service like pwgen.io to generate a secure one. - (optional)
ENFORCE_EMAIL_VERIFICATIONshould be set to"false"if you don't plan to send e-mails. - (optional)
MAIL_DRIVERand relatedMAIL_*settings if you plan to use an E-mail/SMTP provider - See E-mail variables documentation. - (optional)
PF_ENABLE_CLOUD/FILESYSTEM_CLOUDif you plan to use an Object Storage provider.
See the Configure environment variables documentation for details!
You need to mainly focus on the following sections.
You can skip the following sections since they are already configured/automated for you:
RedisDatabase(except forDB_PASSWORD)One-time setup tasks
Starting the service¶
With everything in place and (hopefully) well-configured, we can now go ahead and start our services by running:
This will download all the required Docker images, start the containers, and begin the automatic setup.
You can follow the logs by running docker compose logs - you might want to scroll to the top to logs from the start.
You can use the CLI flag --tail=100 to only see each container's most recent (100 in this example) log lines.
You can use the CLI flag --follow to continue to see log output from the containers.
You can combine --tail=100 and --follow like this docker compose logs --tail=100 --follow.
If you only care about specific containers, you can add them to the end of the command like this docker-compose logs web worker proxy.
Done¶
You made it to the end of the installation tutorial and hopefully you have fully functional Pixelfed instance.
We recommend your next steps is to check out how to customize your Pixelfed instance
If anything was confusing, unclear, or maybe even wrong on this page, then please let us know by submitting a bug report