 Welcome to another video where we're talking about the one-click Macedon installer, and this is on Reclaim Cloud. And it might be worth taking a moment to say, once you install your Macedon instance on Reclaim Cloud, there are still some settings you have to do that depend upon other services. In particular, running transactional emails so that if people sign up for your server, they get an email and that's delivered cleanly, and that's often called SMTP transactional email. We'll look at this where you would enter the settings for that and give you some recommendations on a provider. And then there's the offloading of media and where do you store media? If you're planning on running a fairly decent size or even a small Macedon server, the media accumulates quickly. That's part of the kind of design of the Federation, is it caches and stores media from all these other servers on your server so they're kind of accessed more easily. But this means that your storage can blow up. So in this video, we'll just be showing you how do you configure those environmental variables from those third-party services in your Macedon on Reclaim Cloud. So without further ado, let's take a look at it. We'll start with the Macedon documentation. So this is a page on the docs.joinmastadon.org, basically where you configure your environment. There's a more general page and I'll go to that called Configuring Your Environment. And you'll see here it has things like basic questions around Federation, secrets, deployment. Some of the ones we'll look at is because Postgre, Redis, all of the kind of stack stuff is taken care of for you by the cloud setup. It's stuff like SMTP email delivery and file storage that is not. That's something you would most likely need to set up in order for your service to run as you want. So those are the ones we'll talk a little bit about and we'll look at how Macedon discusses them and then I'll show you where you would update those settings on the one-click installer Macedon on Reclaim Cloud. Okay, so the first one to look at might be the object storage. So object storage is basically often referred to as S3, made very popular by Amazon Web Services S3 service. And then other services kind of took on that like Digital Ocean Spaces, Cloud Flare has one called R2. And you can see next to me a whole bunch of different options. Minio is a nice open source option. All this is, is it's basically abstracting out file storage from a specific server. So files have their own space where they're delivered from. That's not on usually the server where the application is being hosted. And this is very important as I said earlier for Macedon because Macedon can accumulate a lot of files really quickly, which could create issues with your server storage. So it's much better and cheaper to put that on a third party service like S3 or Digital Ocean Spaces. You'll notice here, which is interesting, they don't even mention AWS is S3. They start with Minio, which is open source, and then go to Wasabi, Digital Ocean, Scaleway, ExoScale, Cloud Flare. I've had the most luck with Digital Ocean Spaces. It's the easiest to use, the most user friendly, and it's really pretty affordable. About five bucks a month, depending upon your size, which, you know, it is a deal. So that's that. And then this document, which you can find at docs.joinmacedon.org, will take you through A, what the file system is, how it works. You really don't want to use their file system. You want to use object storage on another service. And then they show you these settings here like S3 enabled, S3 bucket, AWS access key, and that really works across all these services, basically it's your access key and your secret key. These are basically fields of information that you will need once you set it up on whatever service you choose. So they list that out when they explain this. So this is very useful. And like storage for S3, there's also the question of how do you get your email going. And there's a series of very similar kind of fields that you will need for third party service that delivers your email. I don't have too much more experience other than MailGun, which is what we've been using extensively. MailGun is pretty much recommended for services like Ghost, where you use transactional email, and Macedon seems to point people towards MailGun. MailGun is pretty affordable again. If you're doing a fairly small server, it may even be free. And here are the various fields that you'll need once you set up your MailGun server. We have other tutorials that deal with setting up MailGun, so I would look for them. I'm sure there's a ton online. But keep in mind, there are certain variables you will need once you set up both S3 and MailGun. You are going to need to add to Macedon. So let's go and look at that. So we're going to limit it here just to transactional email and S3. And we're going to go to our environment where the one click Macedon is. And then we're going to actually go to this little wrench. And this is a file system, kind of like the file manager in a service like C-Panel. And you'll notice on this side, I don't know if it's your left or right, it's my... I'm even confused because of mirroring. So I'm not even going to say you're going to go right here on this side to Macedon. And you're going to go from that, which is favorited. So you'll always see that there when you open up this file manager. You're going to see an environment file or a .env file. This is the file where you're going to add those variables from whatever service you use. So if I click here to that little wrench or that little cog and I click open, this will then, and I'll kind of remove myself from this shot. So it's a little bit clearer. So let me do that. So here you'll see it has some of the basic setups. You never want to change your domain here because that will break things. But you can. This is your Let's Encrypt email, all of which is done for you with the one click installer. It has various concurrency and threads. If you want to kind of play with that, you can. I would read up more on that. But here is the mail settings. So this is for the transactional email. And you'll see it has these variables like SMTV login, password, what's the from address, etc. This is all stuff. Once you set up your mail, going to count and create an email for this service. You're going to want to enter here. Same is true for the S3 storage S3 enabled S3 protocol S3 bucket region. All of this stuff you're going to enter and then save the file and restart or basically spin down and spin back up the mastodon instance. One of the things to keep in mind is there's several variables here. But if I go back to configuring your environment, say for configuring object storage, you'll notice there's more, right? All of the variables that are listed in our environment are not all the variables you may be able to use. Keep that in mind. You may be able to add an alias or other variables that aren't listed here. So be sure to consult the documentation. And I believe that's also true for email. So even though we have a series of variables listed here, you could also want you could also add more depending if they're available. So this is where you would update the transactional email, the S3 storage. Once you did, you would save that file. I have nothing to say because I didn't add anything. But the final piece, which is pretty important is once everything said and done and you made your changes to variables, you would then need to kind of spin down and spin back up the instances. I believe, let me just, let me just confirm as much, that in the Mastodon tutorial that Taylor did, he has a really good command that will do this for you. And it is true. So this is the guide Taylor wrote and I'll link it in the video notes. And as well as I'll link all the admin configuring environment stuff from Docker, I referenced here. And you'll see this, this is where you can spin the container down and then up again. So I'm going to copy that. I'm going to go into my reclaimed cloud SSH web root access. And that's going to compose down. So that's basically taking those Docker instances and bringing them all down. And then the next line in this terminal instance is saying, hey, Docker compose up detach. So bring everything up and detach it. And we are. And that's it. And once you make any changes to the environment file, you always need to spin the Docker instance down and then spin it back up. That's always going to be a requirement. So this is just basically a very quick tutorial to give you a sense of a what configurations you have to do after using the one click installer, namely S3 storage and transactional email. Be where you add those variables once you set them up in your mastodon instance. And that is in the dot env file or the environment file within your Docker container. Hopefully this helps you get started with your mastodon. But as always, if you have any questions, reach out to reclaim hosting support. All right. Thanks again.