This guide walks you through getting GoToSocial up and running using the official container images we publish. In this case we'll be using the Docker runtime directly through [Docker Compose](https://docs.docker.com/compose) together with SQLite as the database.
You can also run GoToSocial using a container orchestration system such as [Kubernetes](https://kubernetes.io/) or [Nomad](https://www.nomadproject.io/), but that is beyond the scope of this guide.
You need a working directory in which your docker-compose file will be located, and a directory for GoToSocial to store data in, so create these directories with the following command:
Use `wget` to download the latest [docker-compose.yaml](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial/main/example/docker-compose/docker-compose.yaml) example, which we'll customize for our needs:
Because GoToSocial can be configured using [Environment Variables](../../configuration/index.md#environment-variables), we can skip mounting a config.yaml file into the container, to make our configuration simpler. We just need to edit the docker-compose.yaml file to change a few things.
Both the `latest` and `snapshot` tags are moving tags, whereas the `vX.Y.Z` tags are immutable. The result of pulling a moving tag might change from day to day. `latest` on one system might not be the same `latest` on a different system. It's recommended to use the `vX.Y.Z` tags instead so you always know exactly which version of GoToSocial you're running. The list of releases can be found [right here](https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial/releases), with the newest release at the top.
To ensure that your GoToSocial server displays the correct time on posts and in logs, you can set the timezone of the server by editing the `TZ` environment variable.
1. Remove the `#` before `TZ: UTC` in the environment section.
2. Change the `UTC` part to your timezone identifier. For a list of these identifiers, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tz_database_time_zones.
For example, if you are running your server in Minsk, you would set `TZ: Europe/Minsk`, Japan would be `TZ: Japan`, Dubai would be `TZ: Asia/Dubai`, etc.
If you don't set this, the default `UTC` will be used.
By default, Dockerized GoToSocial runs with Linux user/group `1000:1000`, which is fine in most cases. If you want to run as a different user/group, you should change the `user` field in the docker-compose.yaml accordingly.
For example, let's say you created the `~/gotosocial/data` directory for a user with id `1001`, and group id `1001`. If you now try to run GoToSocial without changing the `user` field, it will get a permissions error trying to open its database file in the directory. In this case, you would have to change the `user` field of the docker compose file to `1001:1001`.
There are many other configuration options documented in the config.yaml file, which you can use to further customize the behavior of your GoToSocial instance. These use sensible defaults where possible, so you don't necessarily need to make any changes to them right now, but here are a few you may be interested in:
-`GTS_INSTANCE_LANGUAGES`: array of [BCP47 language tags](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IETF_language_tag) which determines the preferred languages of your instance.
-`GTS_MEDIA_REMOTE_CACHE_DAYS`: number of days to keep remote media cached in storage.
-`GTS_SMTP_*`: settings to allow your GoToSocial instance to connect to an email server and send notification emails.
If you decide to set/change any of these variables later on, be sure to restart your GoToSocial instance after making the changes.
!!! tip
For help translating variable names from the config.yaml file to environment variables, refer to the [configuration section](../../configuration/index.md#environment-variables).
On startup, GoToSocial compiles embedded WebAssembly `ffmpeg` and `ffprobe` binaries into [Wazero](https://wazero.io/)-compatible modules, which are used for media processing without requiring any external dependencies.
To speed up startup time of GoToSocial, you can cache the compiled modules between restarts so that GoToSocial doesn't have to compile them on every startup from scratch.
If you'd like to do this in your Docker container, first create a `.cache` directory in your working folder to store the modules:
```bash
mkdir -p ~/gotosocial/.cache
```
Then, uncomment the second volume in the docker-compose.yaml file by removing the leading `#` symbol, so that instead of
```yaml
#- ~/gotosocial/.cache:/gotosocial/.cache
```
it reads
```yaml
- ~/gotosocial/.cache:/gotosocial/.cache
```
This will instruct Docker to mount the `~/gotosocial/.cache` directory at `/gotosocial/.cache` inside the Docker container.
Now that GoToSocial is running, you should create at least a user for yourself. How to do so is documented in our [Creating users](../user_creation.md) guide.
GoToSocial should now be running on your machine! To verify this, open your browser navigate to whatever you set as your `GTS_HOST` value. You should see the GoToSocial landing page. Well done!
If you want to run other webservers on port 443 or want to add an additional layer of security you might want to use a [reverse proxy](../reverse_proxy/index.md). We have guides available for a couple of popular open source options and will gladly take pull requests to add more.
