Run Pleroma with a pre-bundled Debian image.

Go through Docker's instructions for installing on your machine. If you want to use a different machine that has Docker, you can run export DOCKER_HOST=ssh://user@host to have your service run remotely.

Create a password (with openssl or however you like) for your database.

echo "POSTGRES_PASSWORD=$(openssl rand -base64 16)" >> .env

Note If you're more comfortable with Nginx, please open a pull request with instructions on setting that, so I can have instructions for that up as well as Cloudflare.

1. Sign up for Cloudflare and configure the DNS for your site with them.
2. Set up a free Zero Trust service.
3. Create a tunnel under Access > Tunnels. When you're asked to route traffic, set the public subdomain and hostname to anything you like and set the service to http://pleroma.

Put the TUNNEL_TOKEN in the .env file.

# in your .env file, make a line like this.
TUNNEL_TOKEN=YOUR_TOKEN_VALUE

Generate the configuration files. Start by logging into the container. If you don't have the Docker images, they'll be downloaded automatically for you.

docker compose run --rm --entrypoint /bin/bash pleroma

Once inside the image, generate the Pleroma's configuration. You'll want to use the same domain/subdomain from the tunnel on this step.

/opt/pleroma/bin/pleroma_ctl instance gen \
  --output /mount/config/config.exs \
  --output-psql /mount/config/setup_db.psql \
  --dbhost "$POSTGRES_HOST" \
  --dbname "$POSTGRES_DB" \
  --dbuser "$POSTGRES_USER" \
  --dbpass "$POSTGRES_PASSWORD" \
  --rum N \
  --uploads-dir /mount/uploads \
  --static-dir /mount/static \
  --listen-ip 0.0.0.0 \
  --listen-port 4000 \
  --read-uploads-description Y \
  --strip-uploads-location Y \
  --dedupe-uploads N \
  --anonymize-uploads Y

Still in the image, you'll want to generate the database.

psql -f /mount/config/setup_db.psql "postgres://$POSTGRES_USER:$POSTGRES_PASSWORD@$POSTGRES_HOST:5432"

Finally, you'll want to run pending migrations. When you upgrade the base Pleroma image, you'll want to re-run this command.

/opt/pleroma/bin/pleroma_ctl migrate

Add yourself as an admin.

./bin/pleroma_ctl user new <nickname> <email> --admin --password <password>

Now you can start the service and begin receiving traffic!

docker compose up -d