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Installation & Setup

Install AcelleMail on a DigitalOcean Droplet

This guide has moved. The install walkthrough for any server, a DigitalOcean droplet included, is Install AcelleMail and Get Started.

Technical Editor
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1 min read Intermediate

This guide has moved

👉 Please read the install guide here: Install AcelleMail and Get Started.

That one guide applies to any server, a DigitalOcean droplet included. It walks through the installation wizard step by step (system check, site and admin details, database, cron job) and then the first sending server and plan. It is the install walkthrough we keep current, so follow it instead of a server-specific copy that drifts out of date.

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9 comments

7 comments

  1. Nadia
    is the install wizard skipable for automated deploys? asking because we terraform our infra and clicking through a wizard is awkward
    1. Admin
      No headless flag yet. Run the wizard once on a reference box, bake the .env and installed marker into the image, and rotate APP_KEY and DB creds on first boot.
  2. Tomas
    Clean walkthrough. The supervisor config copy-paste worked first try.
  3. Aditi
    Installed on a $12/mo DigitalOcean droplet for our 30k-subscriber list. Performance has been fine. Memory peaks around 1.6 GB during batch sends; comfortable on 2GB
  4. Anna
    We use Hetzner instead of DO — same Ubuntu image, identical install. Probably $4/mo cheaper. The PTR recrd on Hetzner requires opening a support ticket but they respond same-day
  5. James
    For anyone using systemd-resolved (Ubuntu 22+): set DNSStubListener=no in /etc/systemd/resolved.conf before installing. Otherwise port 53 conflicts when you eventually run a bounce handler.
  6. Linh
    Any reason to use MariaDB over MySQL 8? We default to MariaDB everywhere but I see most Acelle install guides use MySQL.
    1. Admin
      No real reason. The guides say MySQL 8 mostly because that's what the DigitalOcean marketplace image ships with, not because we depend on anything MySQL-specific. Schema is plain InnoDB + utf8mb4, no CTEs, no window functions, no JSON column indexing, so MariaDB 10.4+ runs it fine and that's what a decent chunk of self-hosted installs are on. Two things to watch on MariaDB: set `innodb_default_row_format=dynamic` if you're on an older config, otherwise long index prefixes on utf8mb4 columns can bite during migrate. And if you use DigitalOcean Managed Databases rather than a droplet-local install, they only offer MySQL, so that choice gets made for you. If you hit anything MariaDB-specific during install I'd like to hear the error, we'll add a note to the article.
  7. Lucas
    Followed this on Ubuntu 24.04 last week. Zero issues. The php-imap and php-sqlite3 notes saved me a wizard-error round-trip...

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