I broke my mastodon instance. Can't login

Help
1

I think I committed the cardinal sin of upgrading too many versions. I think I was on 4.3 something and I upgraded to 4.5.4. I don’t have any errors when I run the db migration init service but I don’t think it did anything. The problem is I can get to the login page but can’t login. The front page also doesn’t fully load.
Can I re-do the migration by hand?
Is this a lost cause? I have a db backup pre-upgrade so I can burn this machine. Just wondering if it’s easier to recover.

Thanks!

Update: I figured out where to run the bundle commands to migrate. I’m wondering if this has to do with my ACTIVE_RECORD_ENCRYPTION keys or my other keys. I thought I had them reading in via the extraConfigFiles option but I’m thinking I didn’t?

Update #2:
Set all the key files I could in in /var/lib/mastodon/secrets to what they were before but I don’t think that was the issue so I’ll revert.
When I try to log in I don’t get an error but this:
Jan 22 11:33:44 mast puma[7190]: I, [2026-01-22T11:33:44.843110 #7190] INFO – : [f0e4edb0-92b9-450a-bd46-9614223c5c6d] method=POST path=/auth/sign_in format=html controller=Auth::SessionsController action=create status=0 allocations=3570 duration=120.22 view=0.00 db=6.59
Jan 22 11:33:45 mast puma[7190]: I, [2026-01-22T11:33:45.149153 #7190] INFO – : [f0e4edb0-92b9-450a-bd46-9614223c5c6d] method=POST path=/auth/sign_in format=html controller=Auth::SessionsController action=new status=200 allocations=47925 duration=284.95 view=154.69 db=0.00

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Hi, sorry to hear about that. I’m one of the maintainers of the NixOS module.

This is interesting, since the Mastodon 4.5.0 release notes explicitly only mention that you can’t migrate from pre 4.3 versions.

Still this makes me wonder wether we should add some kind of runtime check that forbids running the migration for a version span that’s “too far”, e.g. when jumping two minor versions.

3

Thanks for your work on the module!
After digging more into it, I found that I migrated from 4.3.14. So I’m not sure why I broke it. The lack of errors is killing me on this, ha.