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ActivityPub Starter Kit

A tiny, single user ActivityPub server.

Although you can use this in production as-is, it’s really meant to be a starting point for your own ActivityPub projects. Here, some ideas to get you going:

  • Allow people to follow your blog on Mastodon.
  • Follow accounts and save links they post to a reading list.
  • Automatically post if your website goes down.
  • Whatever you can dream up!

ActivityPub Stater Kit is easy to extend — built on Express with only a few dependencies.

Local Development

First, copy the .env.default file as .env and fill out the missing variables:

  • ACCOUNT is the account name (the “alice” part of https://example.com/alice).
  • HOSTNAME is the domain at which other servers will be able to find yours on the public internet (the “example.com” part of @[email protected]).

Once you have the .env file filled out, just run npm dev and you’re off to the races!

Getting Online

In order to test how other servers interact with yours, you’ll need to make it available on the real internet.

You can use a service like ngrok to quickly and safely get your server online. Sign up for an account, install the command line tool and then run this command:

ngrok http 3000

ngrok will give you a public URL that looks something like https://2698179b-26eb-4493-8e2e-a79f40b3e964.ngrok.io. Set the HOSTNAME variable in your .env file to everything after the https:// (in this example, 2698179b-26eb-4493-8e2e-a79f40b3e964.ngrok.io).

To find your account in another Fediverse app such as Mastodon, search for your account name and the ngrok URL you just put in your HOSTNAME variable. So if your account name were “alice”, you’d search for your actor alice (https://2698179b-26eb-4493-8e2e-a79f40b3e964.ngrok.io/alice) or @[email protected].

Doing Stuff

ActivityPub Starter Kit doesn’t have a GUI — although you could make one! Instead, there’s an API that you can use. The activities that it supports are posting and following/unfollowing.

Posting

POST /admin/create adds a Create activity to your outbox and notifies all your followers. The request body must be JSON and is used as the activity object. The only required field is type. You can omit fields that the server already knows, such as @context, attributedTo, published and cc.

For example, you could send a POST request containing the following body:

{
  "object": {
    "type": "Note",
    "content": "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet."
  }
}

That will add this activity to your outbox:

{
  "@context": "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
  "type": "Create",
  "id": "https://example.com/alice/post/123",
  "actor": "https://example.com/alice",
  "published": "2022-12-34T12:34:56Z",
  "to": ["https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"],
  "cc": ["https://example.com/alice/followers"],
  "object": {
    "id": "https://example.com/alice/post/456",
    "type": "Note",
    "attributedTo": "https://example.com/alice",
    "content": "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.",
    "published": "2022-12-34T12:34:56Z",
    "to": ["https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"],
    "cc": ["https://example.com/alice/followers"]
  }
}

In addition, it will send this activity to each of your followers, with the top-level cc array replaced with their inbox address.

ActivityPub Starter Kit provides sensible defaults for everything in the Create activity outside of the object property, but you can override them by supplying those properties alongside object. For example, if you wanted to backdate a post, you could supply your own published date:

{
  "published": "2019-12-34T12:34:56Z",
  "object": {
    "type": "Note",
    "content": "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.",
    "published": "2019-12-34T12:34:56Z"
  }
}

Following

POST /admin/follow/:actor follows another Fediverse account. This should cause them to send a request to your inbox whenever they post something. :actor should be replaced with the full actor ID; for example, to follow the account https://example.com/bob, you’d send a POST request to /admin/follow/https://example.com/bob

DELETE /admin/follow/:actor unfollows another Fediverse account. This should cause them to stop sending requests to your inbox whenever they post something. As with the previous endpoint, :actor should be replaced with the full actor ID; for example, to unfollow the account https://example.com/bob, you’d send a DELETE request to /admin/follow/https://example.com/bob

Deploying to Production

When you deploy a real server on the public internet, there are a few more environment variables you’ll need to define:

  • PUBLIC_KEY and PRIVATE_KEY make up the key pair that your server will use to prove that it’s really making requests that appear to come from your domain. This prevents other servers from impersonating you!
  • ADMIN_USERNAME and ADMIN_PASSWORD prevent intruders from accessing the admin endpoints. You’ll need to supply these credentials using HTTP basic authentication.

If you need help creating a key pair, here's a guide on how to do it.