documentation/Running-Mastodon/Administration-guide.md

Administration guide
====================

So, you have a working Mastodon instance... now what?

## Turning into an admin

The following rake task:

    RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rails mastodon:make_admin USERNAME=alice

Would turn the local user "alice" into an admin.

## Administration web interface

A user that is designated as `admin = TRUE` in the database is able to access a suite of administration tools:

* View, edit, silence, or suspend users - https://yourmastodon.instance/admin/accounts
* View PubSubHubbub subscriptions - https://yourmastodon.instance/admin/pubsubhubbub
* View domain blocks - https://yourmastodon.instance/admin/domain_blocks
* Sidekiq dashboard - https://yourmastodon.instance/sidekiq
* PGHero dashboard for PostgreSQL - https://yourmastodon.instance/pghero
* Edit site settings - https://yourmastodon.instance/admin/settings

## Site settings

Your site settings are stored in the `settings` database table, and editable through the admin interface at https://yourmastodon.instance/admin/settings.

You are able to set the following settings:

- Site title
- Contact username
- Contact email
- Site description
- Site extended description

You may wish to use the extended description (shown at https://yourmastodon.instance/about/more ) to display content guidelines or a user agreement (see https://mastodon.social/about/more for an example).

## Confirming Users Manually

The following rake task:

    RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rails mastodon:confirm_email USER_EMAIL=alice@alice.com

Will confirm a user manually, in case they don't have access to their confirmation email for whatever reason.

## Clearing Unconfirmed Users Manually

    RAILS_ENV=production rake mastodon:users:clear
    
Will remove users that never confirmed their e-mail and never signed in, meaning they
only have a user record and an avatar record, with no files uploaded.

## Creating Users while Registration is Closed

    RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rails c
    account = Account.create!(username: 'username')
    user = User.create!(email: 'email', password: 'password', account: account)
    user.confirm
    account.save!
    user.save!

This will create a new user as if they had walked through the registration process and confirmed their account, and will immediately be able to log in.  Make sure the user resets their password away from the temporary password you give them!

## Mastodon-admin mailing list

There's a mailing list open for mastodon instance admins at
https://lists.ffdn.org/wws/info/mastodon-admin. Feel free to join that list for all your questions and to get some feedback 
from other admins!