PixelFed is a federated social image sharing platform, similar to Instagram. Federation is done using the ActivityPub protocol, which is used by Mastodon, PeerTube, Pleroma, and more. Through ActivityPub PixelFed can share and interact with these platforms, as well as other instances of PixelFed.

Please note this is alpha software, not recommended for production use, and federation is not supported yet.

PixelFed is very early into the development stage. If you would like to have a permanent instance with minimal breakage, do not use this software until there is a stable release. The following setup instructions are intended for testing and development.

• PHP >= 7.1.3 (7.2+ recommended for stable version)
• MySQL >= 5.7, Postgres (MariaDB and sqlite are not supported yet)
• Redis
• Composer
• GD or ImageMagick
• OpenSSL PHP Extension
• PDO PHP Extension
• Mbstring PHP Extension
• Tokenizer PHP Extension
• XML PHP Extension
• Ctype PHP Extension
• JSON PHP Extension
• JpegOptim
• Optipng
• Pngquant 2
• SVGO
• Gifsicle

This guide assumes you have NGINX/Apache installed, along with the dependencies. Those will not be covered in these early docs.

git clone https://github.com/pixelfed/pixelfed.git
cd pixelfed
composer install
cp .env.example .env

Edit .env file with proper values

php artisan key:generate

php artisan storage:link
php artisan migrate
php artisan horizon

The ways you can communicate on the project are below. Before interacting, please read through the Code Of Conduct.

• IRC: #pixelfed on irc.freenode.net (#freenode_#pixelfed:matrix.org through Matrix
• Project on Mastodon: @[email protected]
• E-mail: [email protected]

The lead maintainer is on Patreon! You can become a Patron at https://www.patreon.com/dansup