Took me a weekend

First run:

docker compose run web bundle exec rake mastodon:setup

This will guide you through the setup. Remember that without SMTP mailing setup, you can't create new users, so only an admin user will work.

Copy the values created in the setup guide to the .env.production.yml file.

sudo chown -R 991:991 /srv/mastodon/web

commit the changes, push to repo, start the container

docker compose up --build

This should just spin up the container.