How to automatically remove cached media files older that 7 days from your Mastodon instance

mastodon-tootctl-media-purge.txt

This is how to automatically delete cached image previews from your Mastodon instance if they are older than 7 days.
Log in as your "mastodon" User or log in as root and then change to the "mastodon" user, who runs Mastodon:

  # su - mastodon

Open crontab:

  $ crontab -e
  
... and add these lines to your crontab:

  SHELL=/bin/bash
  PATH=/home/mastodon/.rbenv/shims:/home/mastodon/.rbenv/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin

  ###
  ### Mastodon cronjobs for media cache purging
  ###
  RAILS_ENV=production
  @daily cd /home/mastodon/live && bin/tootctl media remove
  
Edit the editor. The new Cron Job will be accepted.
This script assumes that your Mastodon Sourcecode lives in /home/mastodon/live (as suggested by the official setup guide).

If you're running Mastodon in a docker container, run docker exec -it mastodon_web_1 tootctl media remove --days=7