Run your own Pixelfed instance

Every other application here can go in a folder, so a blog can sit at /blog beside a site you built by hand. Pixelfed cannot, and the reason is worth knowing because it is also what keeps it safe: it serves itself from a folder inside itself, called public, and everything else sits above that: its code, its settings and the file holding its database password, all out of reach of a request.

A web server serves a directory. There is no way to serve the public folder of something in /blog at the address /blog, so Dashmox does not offer you a folder for this one and says so on the card before you choose. Install it on a website whose address you want the site to answer on, and whose files you are happy to start fresh: the website has to be empty, the same as any other install.

It needs PHP 8.3 or newer with the bcmath, intl, redis and gd extensions, and the database module. Add the extensions on the website's PHP page first; Dashmox checks before it downloads anything and tells you what is missing rather than failing half way.

Choose Pixelfed under Install an application, give the site a title, a username and an email address, and Install. The password is generated for you and shown once.

It runs as a job rather than while you wait, because it is a long one: Pixelfed is fetched as source and its dependencies are downloaded by Composer, and then it imports a database of cities. Operations shows where it has got to. On a small server, give it ten minutes.

Three things about the website change, and they are the three Pixelfed needs to work at all:

• The website is served from the application's public folder. Its own code stays above that, where a visitor cannot fetch it. Uploaded photos live outside that folder too and are served from their own address, which is why you do not need to do anything about the symlink the usual Pixelfed instructions mention.
• The website gets its own cache. A Redis instance on a socket only that website can open, with 64 MB to start with, which you can change under Background services. Nothing is shared with any other website on the server.
• The website gets a background worker. This is the part that makes Pixelfed a social network rather than a photo album: it puts a new post into the feeds of the people following you, delivers it to the other servers following you, handles what arrives from them, and processes deletions. It drains every queue Pixelfed uses, not just the default one.

You can see both under Background services on the website, including whether the worker is running and which queues it is reading.

The account you were given is the instance's administrator. Its administration is at /i/admin/dashboard on your own address, and Installed software links straight to it.

Public registration on your own Pixelfed instance is off when the install finishes, and that is deliberate: a federated server that anybody can sign up to is a server somebody else will use to send spam under your domain. Turn it on from Pixelfed's own administration when you have decided how you want to handle that, or leave it off and invite people.

Email verification is off too, because a new instance has no mail set up yet and an instance that cannot send mail and insists on verified addresses is one nobody can join. The website's mail goes through this server's own mail service once you have it configured; see outbound mail for what that means for deliverability.

Your own Pixelfed instance is updated from its own administration, not by Dashmox, and the panel reads the version it is running so Installed software tells you which release you are on rather than leaving you to look. A check that could not reach the project says so, because "up to date" and "nobody could be asked" look the same on a page and only one of them is true.

Its photos are files on your server, in the website's own tree, so the website's backups include them and they count against the website's storage limit. A busy instance grows: photos are the whole point of it, and nothing is stored anywhere else by default. Watch the website's disk use on its own page, and raise the limit before it is reached rather than after.

If you remove it, forget the application in Installed software as well as deleting its files. That is what puts the website back to serving its own root and stops the worker. A website still pointed at a public folder whose files are gone answers nothing at all, and the panel would have no way to tell you why.

Pixelfed is a trademark of its own project. It is named here because Dashmox installs it for you, and that is all.