One of the things I have been working on recently is stitching together a bunch of open source tools for an online “Oblivion University,” if you will. I’ll write about that more in another post, but I just wanted to note here that last weekend I decided to try updating three of the open source tools that will be part of this setup: namely Mastodon, Azuracast, and PeerTube —open media ecosystem anyone? And a crazy think happened, they were all successful!
Adrian, I did it!
I’ve been using Mastodon for almost a year now, and also running a few servers for just about as long. I’m really enjoying the mellow pace of that social space. The scale and scope are quite manageable, and even better the software is constantly improving. The most recent update to version 4.2.0 was a big one with a ton of features, and I must say the updates happened without issue on all three servers I currently maintain. The instances are running on top of a Debian VPS in Reclaim Cloud (RC), but I’m getting interested in what a move to Docker for any one of them might look like given I think that will make the process that much easier.
A nice part of running this infrastructure in RC is that I can clone these environments seamlessly, test the upgrades, and if all is good run them on production. Been doing that regularly ensures they work, and guarantees less stress for sure. The commitment to running a Mastodon instance for 30+ people is a bit more overhead then other apps like my blog because if stuff breaks, others will immediately feel it—so I’ve tried to be careful. But with the cloning tool in RC (and regular backups!) Reclaim Hosting has the technology shored up and has run our small corner of the federated social web without too many issues thus far.
The there is my favorite social network, the mighty ds106radio, which is #4life. Far from mission critical software, it has managed to hang around for near on 13 years. I use nightly builds for this when upgrading, so a successful upgrade can been elusive, but last weekend I hit the jackpot and it worked seamlessly. This application is hosted in Docker, and the upgrade was two commands and done.
cd /var/azuracast
./docker.sh update-self
./docker.sh update
Dead simple, and it has been working flawlessly. In fact, the web dj feature even works for the first time ever, so ds106radio is in prime shape for the day-long Halloween show Reclaim is planning most of the day October 31. That show will be on another upgraded instance of Azuracast, namely Relcaim Radio: https://listen.reclaimrad.io
Finally, I gave upgrading PeerTube a shot given I was on a roll, and this is another Docker instance that was seamless to upgrade, three commands and done:
cd /your/peertube/directory docker-compose pull
docker-compose down -v
docker-compose up -d
The value of Docker for seamless updates was all too apparent for me after going from a VPS instance of Mastodon to Docker-driven images for Azuracast and PeerTube, I really need to experiment with a Dockerized Mastodon instance sooner than later, I mean we even have an installer.
Migrating https://reclaim.rocks or https://social.ds106.us into a dockerized instance using our installer might be a good stream or two….
I think if we move critical files, and update the configuration to match the old server (our installer uses a great simplified config file), then move the database over, things **should** work pretty smoothly.
We can even use this to deal with Postgres:
https://jadin.me/db-webui-for-docker/
Let’s do it!
“open media ecosystem anyone?” – don’t tease me. I’m supposed to be working today, not dreaming wild thoughts.
Given your status as Open Source Lord, figured this might appeal to you 🙂
Lols! It’s been a genuine pleasure to just be all out there about it and not feel any institutional constraints. Which reminds me. I’ll email you about an Apereo thing we’re doing that you might be into.
DO IT! KILL ME—I’M HERE!
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