htwtxt – hosted twtxt server

Rationale

twtxt is a protocol and client for decentralized microblogging. Users are expected to provide their feeds as plain text files with URLs accessible over the Internet. htwtxt is a web server to host and grow such text files for users without trivial access to their own web space.

Online demo

A demo instance with frequent downtimes can be tested at http://test.plomlompom.com:8000 – don't expect any of its feeds' URLs to be stable. It's just for testing, and data frequently gets deleted.

Setup and run

Setup Go build environment

With htwtxt written in Go, the setup instructions below expect a Go development environment – with a somewhat current go tool installed, and a $GOPATH set. If your system does not have such an environment, here's some hints on how to set it up:

wget https://storage.googleapis.com/golang/go1.5.3.linux-amd64.tar.gz
sudo tar -C /usr/local -xzf go1.5.3.linux-amd64.tar.gz
export GOPATH=~/go
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/go/bin

(You might want to add the last two lines to your .bashrc or whatever usually initializes your environment variables. And you might want to replace the package pulled by wget by whatever is the newest stable release of Go available.)

Clone, build, run

Once your Go build environment is ready, do this:

git clone https://github.com/plomlompom/htwtxt $GOPATH/src/htwtxt
go get htwtxt
mkdir ~/htwtxt
$GOPATH/bin/htwtxt

This will build and start the server, which will store login and feed data below ~/htwtxt. An alternate directory may be specified with the --dir flag.

Tweaking

Configure port number and TLS

By default, htwtxt serves unencrypted HTTP over port 8000. But the executable accepts the flag --port to provide an alternate port number, and the flags --cert and --key to provide paths to an SSL certificate and key file to run htwtxt as an HTTPS server.

You might encounter the following issue when trying to set a low port number (such as the HTTP standard 80, or the HTTPS standard 443):

ListenAndServe: listen tcp :80: bind: permission denied

This is a common privilege problem and might be solved bis this:

sudo setcap 'cap_net_bind_service=+ep' $GOPATH/bin/htwtxt

Public sign-up

By default, sign up / account creation is not open to the public. The --signup flag must be set explicitely to change that.

Set site owner contact info

The server serves a /info page (from the info.html template) that may include the site owner's contact info, as given with the --info flag.

Activate password reset mails

Feed owners may add e-mail addresses to their login data to authenticate themselves to the site operator and receive password reset links when requested. The password reset mechanism by mail is inactive by default. To activate it, a set of flags --mailserver, --mailport, --mailuser must be set to describe a SMTP server and its login from which to send password reset mails to users' mail addresses. (The site operator will be prompted for his SMTP login password on program start.) Whether this mechanism is trustworthy or not is up to the site operator.

Change HTML templates

By default, HTML templates are read out of $GOPATH/src/htwtxt/templates/. An alternate directory can be given with the flag --templates (it should contain template files of the same names as the default ones, however).

Copyright, license

htwtxt (c) 2016 Christian Heller a.k.a. plomlompom

License: Affero GPL version 3, see ./LICENSE