getwtxt
twtxt registry written in Go!
twtxt is a decentralized microblogging platform
for hackers based on text files. The user is "followed" and "mentioned" by referencing
the URL to their twtxt.txt file and a nickname.
Registries are designed to aggregate several users' statuses into a single location, facilitating the discovery of new users to follow and allowing the search of statuses for tags and key words.
| [Installation] | [Upgrading] | [Configuration] | [Using the Registry] | [Benchmarks] | [Other Documentation] | [Notes] |
Features
- Easy to set up
- Uses an in-memory cache to serve requests
- Pushes to a database at a configurable interval for persistent storage
leveldb (default)sqlite3- Easily run behind
nginx,Caddyor another HTTP server.
Public Instances
Would you like your instance listed? Send a message to the mailing list!
Installation
I have tested getwtxt on the following:
* Debian 9, 10
* Ubuntu Server 18.04LTS, 18.10, 19.04
* OpenBSD 6.6
Build dependencies are minimal, and only include:
* make
* go >= 1.11
* git
First, fetch the sources using git and jump into the directory.
$ git clone https://git.sr.ht/~gbmor/getwtxt
...
$ cd getwtxt
Then, check out the latest release tag.
$ git checkout $(git describe --tags --abbrev=0)
Use make to initiate the build and install process.
$ make
...
$ sudo make install
Upgrading
Upgrading is nearly a identical process. Pull the changes, check out the latest tag, and rebuild.
systemd might yell at you about running systemctl daemon-reload when you
go to restart getwtxt.
While getwtxt is pre-1.0, any patch-level updates (v0.4.x) will not
change configuration values. If a minor version increase has happened, for
example v0.4.x -> v0.5.x, then check if you need to update the config
file before restarting getwtxt.
Configuration
[ Proxying ] [ Starting getwtxt ]
To configure getwtxt, you'll first need to open /usr/local/getwtxt/getwtxt.yml
in your favorite editor and modify any values necessary. There are comments in the
file explaining each option.
If you desire, you may additionally modify the template in
/usr/local/getwtxt/assets/tmpl/index.html to customize the page users will see
when they pull up your registry instance in a web browser. The values in the
configuration file under Instance: are used to replace text {{.Like This}} in
the template.
Proxying
Though getwtxt will run perfectly fine facing the internet directly, it does not
understand virtual hosts, nor does it use TLS. You'll probably want to proxy it
behind
Caddy or nginx for this reason.
Caddy is ludicrously easy to set up, and automatically handles TLS
certificates. Here's the config:
twtxt.example.com
proxy / example.com:9001
If you're using nginx, here's a skeleton config to get you started. Don't
forget to change the 5 instances of twtxt.example.com to the (sub)domain
you'll be using to access the registry, generate SSL/TLS certificates using
LetsEncrypt, and change the port in proxy_pass to whichever port you
specified when modifying the configuration file. Currently, it's set to the
default port 9001
server {
server_name twtxt.example.com;
listen [::]:443 ssl http2;
listen 0.0.0.0:443 ssl http2;
ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/twtxt.example.com/fullchain.pem;
ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/twtxt.example.com/privkey.pem;
include /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-nginx.conf;
ssl_dhparam /etc/letsencrypt/ssl-dhparams.pem;
location / {
proxy_set_header Host $host;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;
proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:9001;
}
}
server {
if ($host = twtxt.example.com) {
return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
}
listen 80;
server_name twtxt.example.com;
return 404;
}
Starting getwtxt
Once you have everything configured to your needs, use systemctl to enable it
to run on system boot, then start the service.
$ sudo systemctl enable getwtxt
...
$ sudo systemctl start getwtxt
Using the Registry
The following examples will all apply to using curl from a Linux, BSD, or
macOS terminal. All timestamps are in RFC3339 format, per the twtxt registry
specification. Additionally, all queries support the ?page=N parameter, where
N is a positive integer, that will retrieve page N of results in groups of
twenty.
The example API calls can also be found on the landing page of any getwtxt instance, assuming the admin has not customized the landing page.
Adding a User
Both nickname and URL are required
$ curl -X POST 'https://twtxt.example.com/api/plain/users?url=https://mysite.ext/twtxt.txt&nickname=FooJr'
200 OK
Get All Tweets
$ curl 'https://twtxt.example.com/api/plain/tweets'
foo_barrington https://foo.bar.ext/twtxt.txt 2019-03-01T09:31:02.000Z Hey! It's my first status!
...
...
Query Tweets by Keyword
$ curl 'https://twtxt.example.com/api/plain/tweets?q=getwtxt'
foo_barrington https://example3.com/twtxt.txt 2019-04-30T06:00:09.000Z I just installed getwtxt!
Get All Users
Timestamp reflects when the user was added to the registry.
$ curl 'https://twtxt.example.com/api/plain/users'
foo_barrington https://foo.barrington.ext/twtxt.txt 2017-01-01T09:17:02.000Z
foo_barrington_jr https://example.com/twtxt.txt 2019-03-01T09:31:02.000Z
...
...
Query Users
Can use either keyword or URL.
$ curl 'https://twtxt.example.com/api/plain/users?url=https://example.com/twtxt.txt'
foo https://example.com/twtxt.txt 2019-05-09T08:42:23.000Z
$ curl 'https://twtxt.example.com/api/plain/users?q=foo'
foo https://example.com/twtxt.txt 2019-05-09T08:42:23.000Z
foobar https://example2.com/twtxt.txt 2019-03-14T19:23:00.000Z
foo_barrington https://example3.com/twtxt.txt 2019-05-01T15:59:39.000Z
Get all tweets with mentions
Mentions are placed within a status using the format @<nickname http://url/twtxt.txt>
$ curl 'https://twtxt.tilde.institute/api/plain/mentions'
foo https://example.com/twtxt.txt 2019-02-28T11:06:44.000Z @<foo_barrington https://example3.com/twtxt.txt> Hey!! Are you still working on that project?
bar https://mxmmplm.com/twtxt.txt 2019-02-27T11:06:44.000Z @<foobar https://example2.com/twtxt.txt> How's your day going, bud?
foo_barrington https://example3.com/twtxt.txt 2019-02-26T11:06:44.000Z @<foo https://example.com/twtxt.txt> Did you eat my lunch?
Query tweets by mention URL
$ curl 'https://twtxt.tilde.institute/api/plain/mentions?url=https://foobarrington.co.uk/twtxt.txt'
foo https://example.com/twtxt.txt 2019-02-26T11:06:44.000Z @<foo_barrington https://foobarrington.co.uk/twtxt.txt> Hey!! Are you still working on that project?e
Get all Tags
$ curl 'https://twtxt.example.com/api/plain/tags'
foo https://example.com/twtxt.txt 2019-03-01T09:33:04.000Z No, seriously, I need #help
foo https://example.com/twtxt.txt 2019-03-01T09:32:12.000Z Seriously, I love #programming!
foo https://example.com/twtxt.txt 2019-03-01T09:31:02.000Z I love #programming!
Query by Tag
$ curl 'https://twtxt.example.com/api/plain/tags/programming'
foo https://example.com/twtxt.txt 2019-03-01T09:31:02.000Z I love #programming!
Delete a User
$ curl -X DELETE -H 'X-Auth: password_in_getwtxt.yml' 'https://twtxt.example.com/api/admin/users?url=https://example.com/twtxt.txt'
200 OK
Benchmarks
$ bombardier -c 100 -n 200000 http://localhost:9001/api/plain/tweets
Bombarding http://localhost:9001/api/plain/tweets with 200000 request(s) using 100 connection(s)
200000 / 200000 [=============================================================] 100.00% 19961/s 10s
Done!
Statistics Avg Stdev Max
Reqs/sec 20006.58 2408.55 26054.73
Latency 5.00ms 3.58ms 62.99ms
HTTP codes:
1xx - 0, 2xx - 200000, 3xx - 0, 4xx - 0, 5xx - 0
others - 0
Throughput: 39.27MB/s
Other Documentation
In addition to what is provided here, additional information, particularly
regarding the configuration file, may be found by running getwtxt with the -m
or --manual flags. You will likely want to pipe the output to less as it is
quite long.
$ ./getwtxt -m | less
$ ./getwtxt --manual | less
If you need to remove getwtxt from your system, navigate to the source directory
you acquired using git during the installation process and run the appropriate
make hook:
$ sudo make uninstall
Notes
twtxt Information: twtxt.readthedocs.io
Interested in twtxt but don't have your own server? github.com/LuRsT/twtxt_on_heroku
twtxt Client Repo: github.com/buckket/twtxt
Registry Specification: twtxt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user/registry.html
Special thanks to github.com/kognise/water.css for open-sourcing a pleasant, easy-to-use, importable stylesheet
Contributing
All contributions are greatly appreciated!
- Mailing list for patches, discussion, etc:
- lists.sr.ht/~gbmor/getwtxt
- Ticket tracker:
- todo.sr.ht/~gbmor/getwtxt