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!

Activity monitoring

Munin graphs can be generated to track your instance activity.

• https://github.com/cquest/mastodon-munin-plugins

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!