Development

Overview

Before starting local development, read the CONTRIBUTING guide to understand what changes are desirable and what general processes to use.

Environments

Vagrant

A Vagrant configuration is included for development purposes. To use it, complete the following steps:

• Install Vagrant and Virtualbox
• Install the vagrant-hostsupdater plugin: vagrant plugin install vagrant-hostsupdater
• Run vagrant up
• Run vagrant ssh -c "cd /vagrant && bin/dev"
• Open http://mastodon.local in your browser

macOS

To set up macOS for native development, complete the following steps:

• Install Homebrew and run: brew install postgresql@14 redis imagemagick libidn nvm to install the required project dependencies
• Use a Ruby version manager to activate the ruby in .ruby-version and run nvm use to activate the node version from .nvmrc
• Run the bin/setup script, which will install the required ruby gems and node packages and prepare the database for local development
• Finally, run the bin/dev script which will launch services via overmind (if installed) or foreman

Docker

For production hosting and deployment with Docker, use the Dockerfile and docker-compose.yml in the project root directory.

For local development, install and launch Docker, and run:

docker compose -f .devcontainer/compose.yaml up -d
docker compose -f .devcontainer/compose.yaml exec app bin/setup
docker compose -f .devcontainer/compose.yaml exec app bin/dev

Dev Containers

Within IDEs that support the Development Containers specification, start the "Mastodon on local machine" container from the editor. The necessary docker compose commands to build and setup the container should run automatically. For Visual Studio Code this requires installing the Dev Container extension.

GitHub Codespaces

GitHub Codespaces provides a web-based version of VS Code and a cloud hosted development environment configured with the software needed for this project.

• Click the button to create a new codespace, and confirm the options
• Wait for the environment to build (takes a few minutes)
• When the editor is ready, run bin/dev in the terminal
• Wait for an Open in Browser prompt. This will open Mastodon
• On the Ports tab "stream" setting change Port visibility → Public