Home

Awesome

RSS to ActivityPub Converter

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.

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

As of the v2.0.0 release of this project, only users who are authenticated with a particular OAuth server can create feeds. Any federated user can still read the feeds. I implemented this because running this service in the open invited thousands of spammers to create feeds and overwhelm the service. With this new model, you can run this as an added bonus for people in a community like a Mastodon server, and as the person running it you are taking on only the moderation burden of the users you are already responsible for on your federated server.

Requirements

This requires Node.js v10.10.0 or above.

You also need beanstalkd running. 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 to install it as a background process.

You'll also need to control some kind of OAuth provider that you can regsiter this application on. This application was designed to work with Mastodon as that OAuth provider (see more on setting that up below), but any OAuth 2.0 provider should work. Many federated software packages besides Mastodon can act as OAuth providers, and if you want something standalone, Keycloak and ORY Hydra are two open source providers you could try.

Installation

Clone the repository, then cd into its root directory. Install dependencies:

npm i

Then copy config.json.template to config.json:

cp config.json.template config.json

Update your new config.json file:

{
  "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",
  "OAUTH": {
    "client_id": "abc123def456",
    "client_secret": "zyx987wvu654",
    "redirect_uri": "https://rss.example.social/convert",
    "domain": "example.social",
    "domain_human": "Example Online Community",
    "authorize_path": "/oauth/authorize",
    "token_path": "/oauth/token",
    "token_verification_path": "/some/path/to/verify/token"
  }
}

Run the server!

node index.js

Go to https://whateveryourdomainis.com:3000/convert or 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.

Sending out updates to followers

There is also a file called queueFeeds.js that 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.

Running with OAuth

OAuth is unfortunately a bit underspecified so there are a lot of funky implementations out there. Here I will include an example of using a Mastodon server as the OAuth provider. This is how I have my RSS service set up: I run friend.camp as my Mastodon server, and I use my admin powers on friend.camp to register rss.friend.camp as an application. The steps for this, for Mastodon, are:

Local testing

You can use a service like ngrok to test things out before you deploy on a real server. All you need to do is install ngrok and run ngrok http 3000 (or whatever port you're using if you changed it). Then go to your config.json and update the DOMAIN field to whatever abcdef.ngrok.io domain that ngrok gives you and restart your server.

Then make sure to manually run updateFeed.js when 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 file bot-node.db to keep track of all the data. To connect directly to the database for debugging, from the root directory of the project, run:

sqlite3 bot-node.db

There are two tables in the database: accounts and feeds.

accounts

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

feeds

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

License

Copyright (c) 2018 Darius Kazemi. Licensed under the MIT license.