Static Website ActivityPub

.. |travis| image:: https://travis-ci.org/ned14/static-website-activitypub.svg?branch=master :align: middle :target: https://travis-ci.org/ned14/static-website-activitypub

(C) 2019 Niall Douglas http://www.nedprod.com/

PyPI: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/static-website-activitypub Github: https://github.com/ned14/static-website-activitypub

Travis master branch all tests passing for Python v3: |travis|

Note that this project is currently in alpha, and should not be used by other people.

Implemented:

• [X] Static website HTTP server
• [X] /.well-known/webfinger
• [X] /actors/preferredUsername
• [ ] GET /actors/preferredUsername/inbox (returns no posts, we do not implement subscriptions)
• [ ] POST /actors/preferredUsername/inbox (returns failure, we do not implement subscriptions)
• [ ] GET /actors/preferredUsername/outbox (list all messages you have ever posted, paginated)
• [ ] POST /actors/preferredUsername/outbox (add a new message)
• [ ] AJAX based HTML page implementing POST to outbox
• [ ] Publish to PyPI

Herein is a CherryPy-based Python web server which implements the ActivityPub (https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/) client-to-server REST API for static website generators such as https://gohugo.io/ and https://jekyllrb.com/. It permits applications which can speak the client-to-server ActivityPub API, such as some mobile phone apps, to add posts to the static website by writing the post into a post directory, and then to call the static website generator to regenerate the static website.

An AJAX based HTML page is optionally also provided which can enable mobile devices to add posts without requiring the installation of an app.

Requirements

1. A working static website whose generator is supported by this service. Currently the only post format supported is yaml-front-matter where posts have a YAML front matter enclosed by ``---```, followed by the post content which will be in either Markdown or HTML. This suits https://gohugo.io/ and https://jekyllrb.com/ just fine. If this doesn't suit your static website generator, pull requests adding support for others are welcome.

2. Your static website does not have a .well-known directory or file, as this is used is by the ActivityPub implementation.

Instructions

1. Generate a default static-website-activitypub.yaml file to somewhere using:

   static-website-activitypub -w static-website-activitypub.yaml
   --serve-directory path/to/your/public/html/directory
   --posts-directory path/to/your/blog/posts/source/directory
   --regenerate-command "shell script for regenerating the website"
   --user-account [email protected]
   --website https://www.domain.com

Customise the yaml script if you need to.

2. Run static-website-activitypub -c path/to/your/static-website-activitypub.yaml, or you can specify all the configuation options on the command line, or by environment variables (see output from --help).

3. Deploy to production using any of the mechanisms listed at http://docs.cherrypy.org/en/latest/deploy.html, which includes the forking model, systemd socket activation, supervisord, wsgi amongst others. Whilst you can serve your static website to HTTP exclusively using this service, it is more scalable to serve the website using nginx etc directly, and only proxy the ActivityPub services to this service.