The Misskey Hub provides a guide to manually set up a self-host instance.

But the guide is for Debian-based distros.

The following guide is for Arch Linux users

Environment setup and discussion

I’m not a fan of ruin my daily driver, thus the built-in systemd-nspawn container is chosen.

You can safely skip this paragraph if you prefer other way of setting up the base OS around.

  1. #RTFM

    man systemd-nspawn, provides a nice example to pacstrap up a Arch Linux chroot.

    The hint here is to ensure you have base, base-devel, an editor, ie. vim, nano, emacs etc., git installed. pacstrap -h is also your good friend.

     # pacstrap -C /tmp/pacman.conf -cKM /var/lib/machines/misskey base base-devel git vim
 ---
 -C: use alternative pacman.conf file, I choose to fetch the fresh conf from Arch's official git and edit the Include lines to Server = closest server, enable Parallel to 10
 -c: use cache in system, reduce bandwidth
 -K: use empty pacman keyring
 -M: do not copy host mirrorlist to guest, kinda reassure isolation

  2. turn on the system, now you shold be in root of the container.

     # machinectl start misskey
 # machinectl shell misskey

  3. set up network. Npsawn default to use virtual ethernet from systemd-networkd, and it relies on resolved as DNS resolver.

    [host] systemctl start systemd-networkd

    [guest] systemctl enable systemd-networkd && systemctl start systemd-networkd

    [guest] systemctl enable systemd-resolved && systemctl start systemd-resolved

  4. the system is ready

Misskey Setup and Installation Guide

Now that let’s follow the steps of the official guide, with modifications

  1. adduser is Debian helper wrapped around, we only have useradd on Arch.

    #RTFM

    useradd -h is your good friend.

    check useradd -D is also good.

    useradd -m misskey should be enough

  2. dependencies:
    • Nodejs: nodejs-lts-gallium
    • PostgreSQL: Arch doesn’t provide old version, and the latest (14.5-4) works anyway, so postgresql
    • Redis: redis
    • Yarn: yarn
    • FFMpeg: ffmpeg
    • NPM: noted that yarn and nodejs do not pull in npm, thus you need to specify it.
    • Node GYP: node-gyp is used during yarn install/build process
     # pacman -S nodejs-lts-gallium postgresql redis yarn ffmpeg npm node-gyp
 ---
 Don't ask me why the scripts in package.json doesn't choose agnostic commands but specify npm.

  3. follow the steps

    • The alternative git clone command I use:
     git clone --depth=1 --single-branch --branch=12.119.0 https://github.com/misskey-dev/misskey.git
 ---
 It does reduce some bandwidth.
 12.119.0 is the latest release tag
    • You’ll need to sync submodules, if not using --recursive option as official suggests.
     git submodule init
 git submodule update

    wait till yarn install drop errors, and fix them – or done without errors, congratulations.

  4. follow the steps

    hints on what to edit:

    • The host domain
    • The user name
    • The db name and password
    • …read through the YAML and see what suits your need.

  5. there shouldn’t be errors during this part.

  6. Some notes

    #RTFM

    check on Arch Wiki for initializing PostgreSQL

    • we don’t have sudo, thus use # su -l postgres instead.
    • [postgres]$ initdb --locale=C.UTF-8 --encoding=UTF8 -D /var/lib/postgres/data --data-checksums
    • start/enable the service.
    • bypass other paragraph of Arch Wiki, as they will be done in Misskey manual.
    • continue with what Misskey guide says.
  7. side notes
    • notes before test run: check that you’ve started redis service.
    • addition to recommended systemd service 
       [Unit]
 ...
 After=postgresql.service redis.service
 ...