How To Use Mastodon With Cloudflare R2

Time needed: 5 minutes

Here’s how to fix that:

1. Log into your Mastodon server

   Log into your Mastodon server and grant yourself root access with sudo su.

2. Navigate to where Mastodon environment file is located

   You’ll find this file located in the following structure (if you’ve installed on Ubuntu, that is):
   /home/mastodon/live/

3. Edit the configuration file

   I use nano but you can use whatever editor you prefer. For nano it looks like this: nano env.production
   If you’ve not configured it to serve from S3 there will be very little info, but if you have, you will have to delete all AWS and S3 lines from that config file.

4. Use this template as a basis for your configuration

   Copy this to a text editor and change the values according to your situation:
   S3_ENABLED=true
S3_BUCKET=NAME_OF_R2_BUCKET
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=XYXYXYXYXYXYXYXXY
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=XYXYXYXYXYXYXYXY
S3_REGION=auto
S3_PROTOCOL=https
S3_HOSTNAME=XYZ.r2.cloudflarestorage.com
S3_ENDPOINT=https://XYZ.r2.cloudflarestorage.com
S3_ALIAS_HOST=pub-ZYZ.r2.dev
This is ignored by R2, but it needs to be set to something valid
S3_PERMISSION=private
   The AWS Access Key and AWS Secret Access Key are your R2 keys, of course. Please take note of when to use and not to use https in front of the values.

5. Copy and paste this inside your terminal

   Copy and paste your version of the above listed template inside your .env.production file and save the file.

6. That should do it.

   If you’re moving over from S3 or an existing instance with local storage, you will have to move over the files to the R2 bucket.
   
   But other than that, that should do it.