Pixelfed on AWS 2.1.0: New FOSS Drop and Modernized Deployment Tooling

April 28, 2026

Our AWS Marketplace Pixelfed pattern now ships Pixelfed v0.12.7, picking up three upstream releases worth of features — OIDC support, pinned posts, custom filters, AVIF/HEIC/libvips, and WebGL photo filters — plus a refreshed CDK, common constructs, and packer toolchain underneath.

We just published version 2.1.0 of the Pixelfed on AWS by FOSSonCloud pattern to AWS Marketplace. The headline is a Pixelfed upgrade from v0.12.4 to v0.12.7 — three upstream releases of new features and fixes — alongside a substantial refresh of the deployment tooling that builds and ships the AMI.

What’s in this release

Pixelfed v0.12.7 (up from v0.12.4)

This bump pulls in everything from v0.12.5, v0.12.6, and v0.12.7. A few highlights from upstream:

New features

  • OIDC support — connect Pixelfed to your existing identity provider for single sign-on
  • Pinned posts — pin posts to the top of your profile
  • Custom filters — Mastodon-style content filtering for the home and public timelines
  • WebGL photo filters — GPU-accelerated filters in the compose flow
  • AVIF, HEIC, and WebP support with libvips image processing and ICC color profile preservation
  • Story improvements — a new StoryIndexService (fan-out-on-write) for faster carousel rendering, plus v1.2 story API endpoints
  • Legal Notice page for instance compliance
  • Email verification resends during app registration

Notable updates and fixes

  • ActivityPub helpers reject statuses with invalid dates and improve private-account handling
  • Direct messages: fixed broken threading, conversation pagination with link headers, and a 72h-limit env toggle
  • OAuth: urn:ietf:wg:oauth:2.0:oob flow restored, scopes returned as a space-separated string per spec, and /oauth/token now includes scopes
  • Status caption rendering refactored to be MastoAPI-compliant and to stop storing duplicate HTML in the database
  • Media pipeline: improved support for non-local filesystems (relevant for the pattern’s S3 AssetsBucket)
  • InboxWorker / InboxValidator lock now sits behind signature validation, and a sendmail security update landed in v0.12.7
  • Numerous postgres/sqlite migration fixes, hashtag search fixes, and notification state fixes

Heads up: Pixelfed now requires PHP 8.3+ (introduced in v0.12.5). Our AMI build handles this for you on fresh deployments.

Pattern-level modernization (not from upstream)

We also refreshed the toolchain that builds and deploys the AMI:

  • CDK 2.225.0 (up from 2.120.0)
  • OE Common Constructs 4.5.1 (up from 4.1.2)
  • OE devenv 2.8.4 (up from 2.5.3) — now requires --break-system-packages for pip3 install on Ubuntu 24.04 (PEP 668)
  • OE Utilities 1.10.0 — packer SCRIPT_VERSION and shared common.mk updates
  • Adopted the versioned AMI parameter convention (AsgAmiIdv210); Asg() now takes an explicit ami_id
  • Removed hardcoded VPC parameters from the Makefile deploy target — CDK now creates a fresh VPC per deploy, matching the taskcat/Mastodon convention
  • Switched the deploy command from docker-compose (V1) to docker compose (V2)
  • Rebranded the AWS Marketplace listing to “Pixelfed on AWS by FOSSonCloud” with the new FOSSonCloud logo
  • Flattened Marketplace pricing to $0.02/hr across all instance dimensions

New integration test suite

This release adds a test/integration/ suite with 11 Playwright tests modeled on our Mastodon pattern. The headline test, test_upload_photo_lands_in_s3, logs in through the UI, POSTs to /api/v1/media with the cookie session, and asserts the upload appears in the AssetsBucket within 30 seconds. The rest cover HTTPS/TLS health, instance API version pinning, CloudFormation stack and EC2/S3 infrastructure checks, plus homepage and login UI smoke tests.

Fresh deployments

Launch from the AWS Marketplace listing. The pattern provisions its own VPC, RDS instance, S3 AssetsBucket, and ASG-backed EC2 fleet, fronted by an ALB with TLS.

What’s next

We’re tracking the upstream Pixelfed dev branch for the next minor release. Issues, feedback, and PRs are welcome on GitHub.

— FOSSonCloud