In this tutorial, I will show you how to run Soapbox-Fe as your main fronted on top of Mastodon-Be. This will replace the homepage and all static pages with Soapbox, using Mastodon only as the API.

mkdir -p /opt/soapbox

curl -L https://gitlab.com/soapbox-pub/soapbox/-/jobs/artifacts/develop/download?job=build-production -o soapbox.zip

busybox unzip soapbox.zip -o -d /opt/soapbox

Now create an Nginx file for Soapbox with Mastodon. If you already have one, replace it:

curl https://gitlab.com/soapbox-pub/soapbox/-/raw/develop/installation/mastodon.conf > /etc/nginx/sites-available/mastodon

Edit nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/mastodon and replace all occurrences of example.com with your domain name. I assume that you already have SSL certificate for your domain, so you need to uncomment the following lines:

# Uncomment these lines once you acquire a certificate:

listen 443 ssl http2;
listen [::]:443 ssl http2;

and SSL line

ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/fullchain.pem;
ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/privkey.pem;

Uncomment the SSL lines if you’ve enabled SSL, uncomment these lines once you acquire a certificate: otherwise do that first.

Finally, ensure the file is symlinked, then restart Nginx:

ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/mastodon /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/mastodon

Run the following to see if everything is ok

nginx -t

If everything is alright, restart it.

systemctl restart nginx