dariusk / rss-to-activitypub, Hacker News

This is a server that lets users convert any RSS feed to an ActivityPub actor that can be followed by users on ActivityPub-compliant social networks like Mastodon. For a demo of this in action, seehttps://bots.tinysubversions.com/convert/

This is based on myExpress ActivityPub Server, a simple Node / Express server that supports a subset of ActivityPub.

Requirements

This requires Node.js v 10. 10 .0 or above.

You also needbeanstalkdrunning. This is a simple and fast queueing system we use to manage polling RSS feeds.Here are installation instructions. On a production server you’ll want toinstall it as a background process.

Installation

Clone the repository, thencdinto its root directory. Install dependencies:

npm i

Then copyconfig.json.templatetoconfig.json:

cp config.json.template config.json

Update your newconfig.jsonfile:

{   "DOMAIN":"mydomain.com",   "PORT_HTTP":"3000",   "PORT_HTTPS":"8443",   "PRIVKEY_PATH":"/ path / to / your / ssl / privkey.pem",   "CERT_PATH":"/ path / to / your / ssl / cert.pem"}

DOMAIN: your domain! this should be a discoverable domain of some kind like “example.com” or “rss.example.com”
PORT_HTTP: the http port that Express runs on
PORT_HTTPS: the https port that Express runs on
PRIVKEY_PATH: point this to your private key you got from Certbot or similar
CERT_PATH: point this to your cert you got from Certbot or similar

Run the server!

node index.js

Go tohttps://whateveryourdomainis.com: 3000 / convertor whatever port you selected for HTTP, and enter an RSS feed and a username. If all goes well it will create a new ActivityPub user with instructions on how to view the user.

There is also a file calledqueueFeeds.jsthat needs to be run on a cron job or similar scheduler. I like to run mine once a minute. It queries every RSS feed in the database to see if there has been a change to the feed. If there is a new post, it sends out the new post to everyone subscribed to its corresponding ActivityPub Actor.

Local testing

You can use a service likengrokto test things out before you deploy on a real server. All you need to do is install ngrok and runngrok http 3000(or whatever port you’re using if you changed it). Then go to yourconfig.jsonand update theDOMAINfield to whateverabcdef.ngrok.iodomain that ngrok gives you and restart your server.

Then make sure to manually runupdateFeed.jswhen the feed changes. I recommend having your own test RSS feed that you can update whenever you want.

Database

This server uses a SQLite database stored in the filebot-node.dbto keep track of all the data. To connect directly to the database for debugging, from the root directory of the project, run:

There are two tables in the database:accountsandfeeds.

`accounts`

This table keeps track of all the data needed for the accounts. Columns:

nameTEXT PRIMARY KEY: the account name, in the form[email protected]
privkeyTEXT: the RSA private key for the account
pubkeyTEXT: the RSA public key for the account
webfingerTEXT: the entire contents of the webfinger JSON served for this account
actorTEXT: the entire contents of the actor JSON served for this account
apikeyTEXT: the API key associated with this account
followersTEXT: a JSON-formatted array of the URL for the Actor JSON of all followers, in the form["https://remote.server/users/somePerson", "https://another.remote.server/ourUsers/anotherPerson"]
messagesTEXT: not yet used but will eventually store all messages so we can render them on a “profile” page