Proof of concept of a mastodon server

What is this?

A proof of concept of a mastodon server. It should be able to join the federated network and post toots.

How to run it?

When you set up the site and go to the index, you should be greeted by a page that will let you create the first admin account. After this, you will be able to configure your server. From that point on, things should work.

• So, make sure your /public is accessible by your webserver.

• Set your ENV settings by creating a .env.local

• You need to create the database (postgress) and run the migrations.

• You need to create a JWT token for oauth stuff. You can do this with the ./bin/console app:oauth:generate-key command.

• Make sure you have public/media/image writeable by the webserver. It will be used to store images. We need to change this

• to a proper storage engine to allow easy scaling.

• Once completed, you MIGHT be able to connect to the API. To test this, USE THE ./bin/console app:test:oauth command.

  $ ./bin/console app:test:oauth <domain-without-https://> --verify
  

  Here you will be asked to visit an url. Click that link, enter your username/password if your in-memory user, and you will be redirected to a page with a token in the url. Copy that token and paste it in the console. If all goes well, you will see a json response with your user info and a json with your access token which you can use to do your own curl requests for instance.

• If you want to test during development via a browser, you can set the OAUTH_OVERRIDE=true and set the OAUTH_OVERRIDE_USER to the user who will be automatically logged in when calling an API url.

• Try and setup an account on the mastodon mobile client, whalebird or any other client. Most should work ok enough.

How to contribute?

Think of stuff that we miss, and create an issue for it. Or create a PR with a fix or feature. If it's large, please create an issue first to see if we can incorporate the feature, otherwise it might be waste of your time.

Note that this is written just to get acquainted with the mastodon API. It is not meant to be a production ready server.

What is missing?

Besides a lot:

• Better database entities to cover everything we need.
• Make sure we handle all the API endpoints.
• A proper storage engine for media.
• A proper way to handle the federation.
• Setup the streaming API, as some clients seem to use that.

How to run the tests?

Hah! Well, you can run make test to check coding style and run the test(s).

Global architecture

There are a few major parts to this application. The Controller\Api directory will cover all the API functionality. The webfinger endpoint and the user login page for oauth are found in the main Controllers directory.

There are a few commands in the Command directory, but they probably do not do what you expect them to do, so don't run them blindly.

There is mention of an "inbox", basically this is a big json file which captures all the incoming messages. It's one of the first pre-db things i've setup and it is not used anymore. It's still there for debugging purposes and to easily replay a large dataset of messages.

Most things are confined in their own service class. But this needs a bit of tidying up.

There are 3 different formats we use in this application. The first is the "internal" format. This is the format we use to store data in the database. The second is the "API" format. This is the format we use to communicate with mastodon clients through the API endpoints. The third is the "activitypub" format. This is the format we use to communicate with other activitypub servers.

What's available:

• This cannot run on php8.2+ because of a dependency on digitalbazaar/jsonld which is not compatible with php8.2+.
• Webfinger is working
• The server is not federating with other servers yet.
• Toots can be created and stored locally. THere are not federated to other servers
• Media Attachment can be created and stored locally
• This server has a basic working api that allows to communicate with clients (mastodon mobile client, and whalebird seems to be working)
• Home timelines for user is shown.
• Tags, trends and searching works.
• Following users works.
• Web interface is not working, but you can register and/or login from the web. It should allow you to create a new mastodon account.