Pavillion

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For instance administrators ​

This guide is for the people who run the server that other people put their calendars on — sysadmins at nonprofits and co-ops, technically inclined organizers running a neighborhood instance, IT staff at regional councils — anyone whose job it is to keep a Pavillion server up and to make the call about who gets a calendar on it.

Your role has two halves:

  • Operating the software — installation, secrets, backups, upgrades; the infrastructure work that keeps the calendars on your instance reachable.
  • Community Stewardship — what your instance is for, who can host a calendar on it, how you decide which other instances to federate with, what to do when a calendar owner you host steps over a line.

Two ways to read this section:

  • Bringing up a new instance? Start with the Quickstart. It takes you from a clean server to running Pavillion instance with one admin account in about thirty minutes. Everything else is reference material to come back to.
  • Already running one? Browse the sidebar. Each guide answers a specific question — how to restore a backup, when to switch from local media storage to S3, what to do when another admin asks you to defederate. Read the one you need.

What's in this section ​

Get an instance running — installation, configuration, reverse proxy, email, media storage. The technical baseline.

Shape your instance — what your instance is for, who gets a calendar, what the rules are. The decisions that nobody else can make for you.

Operate your instance — monitoring, backups, upgrades, secret rotation, troubleshooting. The day-two work.

Federate with the network — how federation looks from the admin seat, testing it, deciding who to trust, handling incidents that cross instance boundaries.

Moderate at the instance level — the boundary with calendar-owner moderation, removing a calendar, account-level operations.

Fund your instance — Stripe setup for community funding, and the harder question of how to talk about money with the people who use what you run.

Relationship with your community — communicating with your calendar owners, and the longer-term work of being someone people trust to host with.

What's not here ​

  • Running a calendar on Pavillion. That belongs to the calendar-owner guides.
  • Contributing to Pavillion itself. That belongs to the developer guides.
  • The ActivityPub protocol. Referenced where you need it, not taught here. You don't need to read the spec to administer a federating server — but knowing what protocol your instance uses to talk to others helps when something goes wrong, and the guides will tell you where to look.