Upgrading to Mastodon v4.2.0 and LibreTranslate

Upgrade to 4.2.0

Mastodon recently reached version v4.2.0, which comes with a bunch of interesting new features!

Upgrading from v4.1.9 was fairly painless, and it comes down to following the instructions on the release notes. Afterwards I re-applied my 1000-character-post modification.

(note: I updated the post to reflect the small difference for Mastodon v4.2.0+*)

LibreTranslate

Another change I made was changing from DeepL to LibreTranslate, a self-hostable translation service. Since I host Mastodon bare-vm (no Docker), I also installed this on the host itself.

Inspiration was drawn from this blog post by the Sleepless Beastie :)

• Install python3 and pip:

$ sudo apt install python3 python3-pip python3-setuptools

• Create the user to run LibreTranslate:

$ sudo useradd --create-home --home-dir /home/libretranslate libretranslate

• Install LibreTranslate:

$ sudo -u libretranslate pip3 install --user --prefer-binary libretranslate

• Update its package index:

$ sudo -u libretranslate /home/libretranslate/.local/bin/argospm update

• Install all translation packages to english:

$ for pkg in $(sudo -u libretranslate /home/libretranslate/.local/bin/argospm search | grep -v translate-en_ | cut -d \: -f 1); do 
  echo "Installing $pkg"
  sudo -u libretranslate /home/libretranslate/.local/bin/argospm install $pkg
done

• Add a systemd unit file under /etc/systemd/system/libretranslate.service:

[Unit]
Description=LibreTranslate
After=network.target

[Service]
User=libretranslate
Group=libretranslate
WorkingDirectory=/home/libretranslate/
ExecStart=/home/libretranslate/.local/bin/libretranslate --host 127.0.0.1 --port 5000 --disable-files-translation
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

• Reload systemd and start the service

$ sudo systemctl daemon-reload
$ sudo systemctl enable --now libretranslate

• Adjust the mastodon .env.production file to use LibreTranslate. Add:

ALLOWED_PRIVATE_ADDRESSES=127.0.0.1
LIBRE_TRANSLATE_ENDPOINT=http://127.0.0.1:5000

• Restart Mastodon-web

$ sudo systemctl restart mastodon-web

and you should be good to go!