Got a web site? Want social network replies and likes on your site? Want to post and tweet from your site? Bridgy is for you.

https://brid.gy/

Bridgy pulls comments and likes from social networks back to your web site. You can also use it to publish your posts to those networks. See the docs for more details.

License: This project is placed in the public domain.

You'll need the App Engine Python SDK version 1.9.15 or later (for vendor support). Add it to your $PYTHONPATH, e.g. export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:/usr/local/google_appengine, and then run:

virtualenv local
source local/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.freeze.txt

# We install gdata in source mode, and App Engine doesn't follow .egg-link
# files, so add a symlink to it.
ln -s ../../../src/gdata/src/gdata local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/gdata
ln -s ../../../src/gdata/src/atom local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/atom

python -m unittest discover

The last command runs the unit tests. If you send a pull request, please include (or update) a test for the new functionality if possible!

If you hit an error during setup, check out the oauth-dropins Troubleshooting/FAQ section. For searchability, here are a handful of error messages that have solutions there:

bash: ./bin/easy_install: ...bad interpreter: No such file or directory

ImportError: cannot import name certs

ImportError: No module named dev_appserver

ImportError: cannot import name tweepy

File ".../site-packages/tweepy/auth.py", line 68, in _get_request_token
  raise TweepError(e)
TweepError: must be _socket.socket, not socket

error: option --home not recognized

There's a good chance you'll need to make changes to granary, oauth-dropins, or webmention-tools at the same time as bridgy. To do that, clone their repos elsewhere, then install them in "source" mode with:

pip uninstall oauth-dropins
pip install -e <path to oauth-dropins>
ln -s <path to oauth-dropins>/oauth_dropins \
  local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/oauth_dropins

pip uninstall granary
pip install -e <path to granary>
ln -s <path to granary>/granary \
  local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/granary

pip uninstall webmention-tools
# webmention-tools isn't in pypi
ln -s <path to webmention-tools>/webmentiontools \
  local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/webmentiontools

The symlinks are necessary because App Engine's vendor module evidently doesn't follow .egg-link or .pth files. :/

This command runs the tests, pushes any changes in your local repo, and deploys to App Engine:

cd ../oauth-dropins && source local/bin/activate.csh && python -m unittest discover && \
  cd ../granary && source local/bin/activate.csh && python -m unittest discover && \
  cd ../bridgy && source local/bin/activate.csh && python -m unittest discover && \
  git push && md5sum -c keys.md5 && ~/google_appengine/appcfg.py update .

remote_api_shell is a useful interactive Python shell that can interact with the production app's datastore, memcache, etc. To use it, create a service account and download its JSON credentials, put it somewhere safe, and put its path in your GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS environment variable.

App Engine's built in dashboard and log browser are pretty good for interactive monitoring and debugging.

For alerting, we've set up Google Cloud Monitoring (née Stackdriver). Background in #377. It sends alerts by email and SMS when HTTP 4xx responses average >.1qps or 5xx >.05qps, latency averages >15s, or instance count averages >5 over the last 15m window.

The datastore is automatically backed up by a cron job that runs Datastore Admin backup and stores the results in Cloud Storage, in the brid-gy.appspot.com bucket. It backs up all entities weekly, and all entities except Response and SyndicatedPost daily, since they make up 92% of all entities by size and they aren't as critical to keep.

We use this command to set a Cloud Storage lifecycle policy on that bucket that deletes all files over 30 days old:

gsutil lifecycle set cloud_storage_lifecycle.json gs://brid-gy.appspot.com

So far, this has kept us within the 5GB free quota. Run this command to see how much space we're currently using:

gsutil du -hsc gs://brid-gy.appspot.com/\*