tingley

1. Register a domain name. Buy a cert for it.
2. Spin up Ubuntu Trusty 14.04 on AWS & point DNS at the instance. Don't bother making user accounts or anything; only somebody with your key should be able to ssh in. Add security group rules allowing https from anywhere, or maybe http if you want to redirect.
3. Make an EBS volume or raid up some instance stores and mount them on /mnt/mastodon, owned by ubuntu.
4. Download all the files in this gist to your local controlling host, e.g., your laptop.
5. Make a file named inventory with [general]\nyour-host.tld in it.
6. Put all of the *.conf files in this gist into a subdirectory named files.
7. Put your certs somewhere in the directory & make sure the ansible playbook services.yml is pointing to them.
8. Run ansible-playbook -i inventory host-setup.yml
9. Run ansible-playbook -i inventory mastodon.yml
10. you might get ruby 2.3.3 instead of 2.3.1 in which case you should just edit the Gemfile.