How to upgrade Mastodon to v4.1.0 🐘

sean

Mastodon v4.1.0 was recently released!There are many enhancements and fixes, includeing new poll options and (finally!) a listing of your followed hashtags. 🎉

If you've installed Mastodon on Opalstack via our installer and want to upgrade to v4.1.0 then the procedure below will get you there. If you're running any other version of Mastodon, upgrading to any other version other than 4.1.0, or are running a manual installation then this procedure is not for you. We'll have a generic upgrade procedure available in the future.

Note that the commands below use the following placeholders which you'll need to substitute as follows:

app_name - the name of your Mastodon application. Your app names are available at: https://my.opalstack.com/apps/
db_user - the name of your database user, available in: ~/apps/app_name/mastodon/.env.production
db_name - the name of your database, available in: ~/apps/app_name/mastodon/.env.production

To proceed:

Run the following commands to make a backup:

pg_dump -U db_user -f ~/apps/app_name/db.sql db_name
cp -Rp ~/apps/app_name ~/app_name_backup

Run the following command to disable your cron jobs:
```
crontab -l | sed -e 's/^/# /g' | crontab
```
Note: this will disable all of your cron jobs for your shell user. If you have cron jobs unrelated to your Mastodon app and you don't want them disabled then run crontab -e to edit your cron jobs manually.

Run the following commands to perform the upgrade.

Note that the app will be offline during the upgrade due to the memory constraints of your hosting plan. If you're certain you have a lot of spare RAM (for example if you are on a 4GB VPS or higher with at least 2GB of free RAM) and don't want the site to be offline then you can omit the ../stop command at your own risk.

cd ~/apps/app_name/
./stop
source setenv
wget https://nodejs.org/dist/v16.18.1/node-v16.18.1-linux-x64.tar.xz
tar xf node-v16.18.1-linux-x64.tar.xz 
mv node-v16.18.1-linux-x64 node
export PATH=$PWD/node/bin:$PATH
corepack enable
yarn set version classic
cd mastodon
git checkout -- .
git fetch && git checkout v4.1.0
bundle config set jobs 4
bundle install
RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rails db:migrate
RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rails assets:precompile
../restart

Run the following command to re-enable your cron jobs (or run crontab -e to edit your cron jobs manually):
```
crontab -l |  sed -e 's/^# //g' | crontab
```
Your backup will very likely use a lot of disk space. To remove it following the upgrade, run the following command:
```
rm -rf ~/app_name_backup
```

You're done!

mergy

Thanks for the instructions for newbie Mastodon instance admins like me!

All went well. I did add one thing prior to doing the backups - I took the files storage down to just 2 days to cut the amount of data an files because I typically run like 7 days, doubling that for backup gets me close to my service level limits.

cd ~/apps/<appname>/mastodon/
source ../setenv
RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec tootctl statuses remove --days 2;
RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec tootctl media remove --days 2;
RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec tootctl preview_cards remove --days 2

This got me down to like 40gb or so - so doing the backup still left me with enough space. Thanks again for the help and assistance through all this! Been fun running my own server on Opalstack.

brianrlawson

Hey @sean - as you know, I'm a noob and have trouble with my install in the past. So, before I started rolling I wanted to pause and ask...is it safe to perform these same steps to go to 4.1.1?

Thanks,
Brian

sean

brianrlawson yes, just change this line:

git fetch && git checkout v4.1.0

... to this:

git fetch && git checkout v4.1.1

Also, if you've used the above upgrade procedure to move to 4.1.0 in the past then you can skip most of the first half of it, eg like so:

cd ~/apps/app_name/
./stop
source setenv
cd mastodon
git checkout -- .
git fetch && git checkout v4.1.1
bundle config set jobs 4
bundle install
yarn install
RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rails assets:precompile
../restart