Pleroma is a federated social networking platform, compatible with GNU social and other OStatus implementations. It is free software licensed under the AGPLv3.

It actually consists of two components: a backend, named simply Pleroma, and a user-facing frontend, named Pleroma-FE.

Its main advantages are its lightness and speed.

Pleromians trying to understand the memes

• Based on the elixir:alpine image
• Ran as an unprivileged user
• It works great

Sadly, this is not a reusable (e.g. I can't upload it to the Docker Hub), because for now Pleroma needs to compile the configuration. 😢 Thus you will need to build the image yourself, but I explain how to do it below.

• PLEROMA_VER : Pleroma version (latest commit of the develop branch by default)
• GID: group id (default: 911)
• UID: user id (default: 911)

Create a folder for your Pleroma instance. Inside, you should have Dockerfile and docker-compose.yml from this repo.

Here is the docker-compose.yml. You should change the POSTGRES_PASSWORD variable.

version: '2.3'

services:
  postgres:
    image: postgres:9.6-alpine
    container_name: pleroma_postgres
    restart: always
    environment:
      POSTGRES_USER: pleroma
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: pleroma
      POSTGRES_DB: pleroma
    volumes:
      - ./postgres:/var/lib/postgresql/data

  web:
    build: .
    image: pleroma
    container_name: pleroma_web
    restart: always
    ports:
      - '127.0.0.1:4000:4000'
    volumes:
      - ./uploads:/pleroma/uploads
    depends_on:
      - postgres

Create the upload and config folder and give write permissions for the uploads:

mkdir uploads config
chown -R 911:911 uploads

Pleroma needs the citext PostgreSQL extension, here is how to add it:

docker-compose up -d postgres
docker exec -i pleroma_postgres psql -U pleroma -c "CREATE EXTENSION IF NOT EXISTS citext;"
docker-compose down

Configure Pleroma. Copy the following to config/secret.exs:

use Mix.Config

config :pleroma, Pleroma.Web.Endpoint,
   http: [ ip: {0, 0, 0, 0}, ],
   url: [host: "pleroma.domain.tld", scheme: "https", port: 443],
   secret_key_base: "<use 'openssl rand -base64 48' to generate a key>"

config :pleroma, :instance,
  name: "Pleroma",
  email: "admin@email.tld",
  limit: 5000,
  registrations_open: true

config :pleroma, :media_proxy,
  enabled: false,
  redirect_on_failure: true,
  base_url: "https://cache.domain.tld"

# Configure your database
config :pleroma, Pleroma.Repo,
  adapter: Ecto.Adapters.Postgres,
  username: "pleroma",
  password: "pleroma",
  database: "pleroma",
  hostname: "postgres",
  pool_size: 10

You need to change at least:

• host
• secret_key_base
• email

Make sure your PostgreSQL parameters are ok.

You can now build the image. 2 way of doing it:

docker-compose build
# or
docker build -t pleroma .

I prefer the latter because it's more verbose.

Setup the database:

docker-compose run --rm web mix ecto.migrate

Get your web push keys and copy them to secret.exs:

docker-compose run --rm web mix web_push.gen.keypair

You will need to build the image again, to pick up your updated secret.exs file:

docker-compose build
# or
docker build -t pleroma .

You can now launch your instance:

docker-compose up -d

Check if everything went well with:

docker logs -f pleroma_web

You can now setup a Nginx reverse proxy in a container or on your host by using the example Nginx config.

By default, the Dockerfile will be built from the latest commit of the develop branch as Pleroma does not have releases for now.

Thus to update, just rebuild your image and recreate your containers:

docker-compose pull # update the PostgreSQL if needed
docker-compose build .
# or
docker build -t pleroma .
docker-compose run --rm web mix ecto.migrate # migrate the database if needed
docker-compose up -d # recreate the containers if needed

If you want to run a specific commit, you can use the PLEROMA_VER variable:

docker build -t pleroma . --build-arg PLEROMA_VER=develop # a branch
docker build -t pleroma . --build-arg PLEROMA_VER=a9203ab3 # a commit
docker build -t pleroma . --build-arg PLEROMA_VER=v2.0.7 # a version

a9203ab3 being the hash of the commit. (They're here)

Here are other Pleroma Docker images that helped me build mine:

• potproject/docker-pleroma
• rysiek/docker-pleroma
• RX14/iscute.moe