In this tutorial, we will guide and walk you through the process of installing Mastodon on a Debian 9 VPS.
Mastodon is an open-source free social network based on the open web protocol. It uses Ruby on Rails for the back-end, and React.js and Redux for the front-end. This social media platform is a lot like Twitter, with a focus towards text and media sharing. This platform being open-source means that you can run a private social network for your and your friends to use privately and with no ads.
This guide should work on other Linux VPS systems as well, but it was tested and written for a Debian 9 VPS. The install process shouldn’t take too long, the longest part being the compilation process. Let’s begin with the installation.
Etherpad is a real-time editor that is web-based and comes as an open-source package. This application allows users to simultaneously edit documents in real time and to see the differences through the use of colored text. Etherpad also has a chat box that allows users to easily communicate between one another, further improving productivity. This won’t take very long to install, so let’s get startedz
CiviCRM is an open source constituent relationship management (CRM) specifically designed for the needs of non-profit, non-governmental, and advocacy groups. It is developed and maintained by a growing community of contributors and is designed to manage information about an organization’s members, event registrants, donors, subscribers, grant application seekers, funders, and case contacts. CiviCRM can be deployed in conjunction with either WordPress, Drupal or Joomla to track contacts and their relationships to projects and initiatives.
Pip is a package management system which can be used to install and manage packages written in 
Apache CouchDB is a free and open-source NoSQL database solution. Apache CouchDB has a document-oriented NoSQL database architecture and is implemented in the concurrency-oriented language Erlang; Apache CouchDB uses JSON to store data with documents, it uses JavaScript as its query language using MapReduce, and it uses RESTful HTTP for its API. CouchDB works smoothly with all latest modern web and mobile applications. All of this makes for a pretty seamless database experience. Let’s get started with installing CouchDB.
Mastodon is a free and open-source network platform that is very similar to the famous social media platform known as Twitter. However, unlike Twitter, there is no single central authority and there is no advertising. Mastodon is written in Ruby and JavaScript and its open-source nature makes sure that it remains open for anyone to use privately and securely. Anyone can create a Mastodon server and build their own communities with friends. Additionally, Mastodon is supported by and available through multiple apps for iOS, Android, and other platforms, which will allow you to keep in touch with your friends anywhere you go. Let’s start with installing Mastodon.
Zabbix is a highly integrated open-source system monitoring solution. It is a software that provides monitoring of numerous parameters and metrics such as CPU, network, disk, and many others. All of the reports and statistics are accessible using a web-based front-end interface which ensures that the status of your network and the health of your servers can be easily viewed, from any location, at any time. Let’s begin with installing Zabbix.
Icinga 2 is a modern open-source network monitoring application which can be used to monitor the network infrastructure and check the health of servers and their services. Icinga 2 is a branch of Nagios rewritten from scratch in C++. It is backwards-compatible with all existing Nagios plugins, add-ons, and the Nagios user interface. Icinga 2 has a user-friendly web interface, but it also comes with a command line interface that can be used to monitor networks, servers and services with specific commands.