Bridgy connects your web site to social media. Likes, retweets, mentions, cross-posting, and more. See the user docs for more details, or the developer docs if you want to contribute.
Bridgy is part of the IndieWeb ecosystem. In IndieWeb terminology, Bridgy offers backfeed, POSSE, and webmention support as a service.
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) or the
Google Cloud SDK (aka gcloud
)
with the gcloud-appengine-python
and gcloud-appengine-python-extras
components.
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!
To run the entire app locally, run this in the repo root directory:
dev_appserver.py --log_level debug app.yaml background.yaml
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 -y 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 -y granary
pip install -e <path to granary>
ln -s <path to granary>/granary \
local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/granary
pip uninstall -y webmentiontools
# 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. :/
To deploy to App Engine, run scripts/deploy.sh
.
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.
So you want to add a new silo? Maybe MySpace, or Friendster, or even Tinder? Great! Here are the steps to do it. It looks like a lot, but it's not that bad, honest.
- Find the silo's API docs and check that it can do what Bridgy needs. At minimum, it should be able to get a user's posts and their comments, likes, and reposts, depending on which of those the silo supports. If you want publish support, it should also be able to create posts, comments, likes, reposts, and/or RSVPs.
- Fork and clone this repo.
- Create an app (aka client) in the silo's developer console, grab your app's id (aka key) and secret, put them into new local files in the repo root dir, following this pattern. You'll eventually want to send them to @snarfed and @kylewm too, but no hurry.
- Add the silo to oauth-dropins if
it's not already there:
- Add a new
.py
file for your silo with an auth model and handler classes. Follow the existing examples. - Add a button image.
- Add it to the app front page and the README.
- Add a new
- Add the silo to granary:
- Add a new
.py
file for your silo. Follow the existing examples. At minimum, you'll need to implementget_activities_response
and convert your silo's API data to ActivityStreams. - Add a new unit test file and write some tests!
- Add it to
api.py
(specificallyHandler.get
),app.py
,app.yaml
,index.html
, and the README.
- Add a new
- Add the silo to Bridgy:
- Add a new
.py
file for your silo with a model class. Follow the existing examples. - Add it to
app.py
,app.yaml
, andhandlers.py
(just import the module). - Add a 48x48 PNG icon to
static/
. - Add a new
SILO_user.html
file intemplates/
and add the silo toindex.html
. Follow the existing examples. - Add the silo to
about.html
and this README. - If users' profile picture URLs can change, add a cron job that updates them
to
cron.py
andcron.yaml
. Also add the model class to the datastore backup job there.
- Add a new
- Optionally add publish support:
- Implement
create
andpreview_create
for the silo in granary. - Add the silo to
publish.py
: import its module, add it toSOURCES
, and update this error message. - Add a
publish-signup
block toSILO_user.html
and add the silo tosocial_user.html
. - Update
app.yaml
.
- Implement
Good luck, and happy hacking!
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 issue 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.
I occasionally generate stats and graphs of usage and growth from the BigQuery dataset (#715). Here's how.
-
Export the full datastore to Google Cloud Storage. Include all entities except
*Auth
and other internal details. Check to see if any new kinds have been added since the last time this command was run.gcloud datastore export --async gs://brid-gy.appspot.com/stats/ --kinds Blogger,BlogPost,BlogWebmention,FacebookPage,Flickr,GitHub,GooglePlusPage,Instagram,Medium,Publish,PublishedPage,Response,SyndicatedPost,Tumblr,Twitter,WordPress
Note that
--kinds
is required. From the export docs, Data exported without specifying an entity filter cannot be loaded into BigQuery. -
Wait for it to be done with
gcloud datastore operations list | grep done
. -
for kind in BlogPost BlogWebmention Publish Response SyndicatedPost; do bq load --replace --nosync --source_format=DATASTORE_BACKUP datastore.$kind gs://brid-gy.appspot.com/stats/all_namespaces/kind_$kind/all_namespaces_kind_$kind.export_metadata done for kind in Blogger FacebookPage Flickr GitHub GooglePlusPage Instagram Medium Tumblr Twitter WordPress; do bq load --replace --nosync --source_format=DATASTORE_BACKUP sources.$kind gs://brid-gy.appspot.com/stats/all_namespaces/kind_$kind/all_namespaces_kind_$kind.export_metadata done
-
Check the jobs with
bq ls -j
, then wait for them withbq wait
. -
Run the full stats BigQuery query. Download the results as CSV.
-
Open the stats spreadsheet. Import the CSV, replacing the data sheet.
-
Check out the graphs! Save full size images with OS or browser screenshots, thumbnails with the Save Image button. Then post them!
The datastore is automatically backed up by an App Engine cron job that runs Datastore managed export (details) and stores the results in Cloud Storage, in the brid-gy.appspot.com bucket. It backs up weekly and includes all entities except Response
and SyndicatedPost
, since they make up 92% of all entities by size and they aren't as critical to keep.
(We used to use Datastore Admin Backup, but it shut down in Feb 2019
We use this command to set a Cloud Storage lifecycle policy on that bucket that prunes older backups:
gsutil lifecycle set cloud_storage_lifecycle.json gs://brid-gy.appspot.com
Run this to see how much space we're currently using:
gsutil du -hsc gs://brid-gy.appspot.com/\*
Run this to download a single complete backup:
gsutil -m cp -r gs://brid-gy.appspot.com/weekly/datastore_backup_full_YYYY_MM_DD_\* .
Also see the BigQuery dataset (#715).