Pleroma: admin-fe

I recently switched from Mastodon to Pleroma, for no real reason in specific other than: Pleroma is far less resource intensive. Setting up Pleroma was a breeze compared to setting up Mastodon–I remember having a great deal of trouble. I enjoy the simpler interface as well. While Pleroma doesn’t have all of the flashy features¹ mastodon does, I don’t need or use them anyway.

Tonight I came across admin-fe for Pleroma, and thought I’d give it a shot even though I’m the only use on my instance. Installation documentation is lacking for the project, so I thought I’d offer my notes in case they could be useful to anyone else.

I downloaded the latest version of admin-fe² and unarchived the tarball.

curl -O https://git.pleroma.social/pleroma/admin-fe/-/archive/1.2.0/admin-fe-1.2.0.tar.gz
tar xzvf admin-fe-1.2.0.tar.gz

Entered the directory and attempted to run yarn build:prod per the README:

cd admin-fe-1.2.0
yarn build:prod

I was greeted with a somewhat unhelpful error:

Yarn requires Node.js 4.0 or higher to be installed.

So I looked Node.js up, I remember it takes more to install than sudo apt install nodejs. I saw the latest version was 12, which I found odd considering Pleroma’s fairly new on the block.

After installing Node.js, yarn build:prod still wasn’t successful:

$ yarn build:prod
yarn run v1.17.3
$ cross-env NODE_ENV=production env_config=prod node build/build.js
/bin/sh: 1: cross-env: not found
error Command failed with exit code 127.
info Visit https://yarnpkg.com/en/docs/cli/run for documentation about this command.

I solved this by simply running yarn with no arguments. Finally, yarn build:prod was successful and I had a built distribution of admin-fe.

Serving admin-fe was a bit of a hassle, mostly due to my limited knowledge of nginx configuration. At first, my config looked like this:

location /_admin-fe/ {
    root /var/www/pleroma/admin-fe;
    index index.html
}

Which was failing with an HTTP 404, requests to example.com/_afe were trying to be served from /var/www/pleroma/admin-fe/_afe/. I needed to switch the root directive for the alias directive, add a trailing slash, and I was in business.

Note: I tried to pick a URL that probably wouldn’t become a username. There was no hint towards what to call it in the limited documentation–not that it really matters on an instance for 1 anyway.

The ending result is my location block ended up reading this:

location /_admin-fe/ {
    alias /var/www/pleroma/admin-fe/;
    index index.html;
}

Now the login page loads, is on the right domain³, and it successfully authenticates against my Pleroma database.

Unfortunately, admin-fe seems to have a lot of trouble on my instance and I’m sure it’s due to the way I configured Pleroma. I can’t find any documentation on it, but I vaguely remember choosing something along the lines of “Don’t allow site configuration changes from the frontend.” Thus, my adventures setting up admin-fe have come to an end.

After reaching out on #pleroma on freenode, it’s a big possibility that admin-fe doesn’t work for me because the necessary pieces aren’t implemented on the backend.

If you think you can help, please don’t hesitate to find me on the fediverse ~~or write to my public-inbox.~~

Mastodon 3.0 came out today, some of their new features include: moving accounts, audio in toots, and hashtag auto-suggestions. ↩
1.2.0 at the time of writing ↩
At first I thought about hosting admin-fe at something like admin.example.com, but that didn’t work because now admin-fe would try to load the Pleroma API at admin.example.com/api/... instead of example.com/api/.... ↩

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