Decentralised, minimalist microblogging service for hackers.
Project description
twtxt is a decentralised, minimalist microblogging service for hackers.
So you want to get some thoughts out on the internet in a convenient and slick way while also following the gibberish of others? Instead of signing up at a closed and/or regulated microblogging platform, getting your status updates out with twtxt is as easy as putting them in a publicly accessible text file. The URL pointing to this file is your identity, your account. twtxt then tracks these text files, like a feedreader, and builds your unique timeline out of them, depending on which files you track. The format is simple, human readable, and integrates well with UNIX command line utilities.
tl;dr: twtxt is a CLI tool, as well as a format specification for self-hosted flat file based microblogging.
Features
A beautiful command-line interface thanks to click.
Asynchronous HTTP requests thanks to asyncio/aiohttp and Python 3.
Integrates well with existing tools (scp, cut, echo, date, etc.) and your shell.
Don’t like the official client? Tweet using echo -e "`date -Im`\tHello world!" >> twtxt.txt!
Installation
Release version:
Make sure that you have at least Python 3.4.1 installed.
Install this package using pip:
$ pip3 install twtxtTip: Instead of installing the package globally (as root), you may want to install this package locally by passing --user to pip, make sure that you include ~/.local/bin/ in your $PATH. Using pyvenv and running twtxt from within a virtualenv is also an option!
Run twtxt quickstart. :)
Development version:
Clone the git repository:
$ git clone https://github.com/buckket/twtxt.gitInstall the package via pip in developer mode:
$ pip3 install -e twtxt/Running tests:
Run the tests against all supported python versions:
$ make testRun the tests against a specific python version:
$ tox -e py34Usage
twtxt features an excellent command-line interface thanks to click. Don’t hesitate to append --help or call commands without arguments to get information about all available commands, options and arguments.
Here are a few of the most common operations you may encounter when using twtxt:
Follow a source:
$ twtxt follow bob http://bobsplace.xyz/twtxt
✓ You’re now following bob.List all sources you’re following:
$ twtxt following
➤ alice @ https://example.org/alice.txt
➤ bob @ http://bobsplace.xyz/twtxtUnfollow a source:
$ twtxt unfollow bob
✓ You’ve unfollowed bob.Post a status update:
$ twtxt tweet "Hello, this is twtxt!"View your timeline:
$ twtxt timeline
➤ bob (5 minutes ago):
This is my first "tweet". :)
➤ alice (2 hours ago):
I wonder if this is a thing?View feed of specific source:
$ twtxt view twtxt
➤ twtxt (a day ago):
Fiat Lux!$ twtxt view http://example.org/twtxt.txt
➤ http://example.org/twtxt.txt (a day ago):
Fiat Lux!Configuration
twtxt uses a simple INI-like configuration file. It’s recommended to use twtxt quickstart to create it. On Linux twtxt checks ~/.config/twtxt/config for its configuration. OSX uses ~/Library/Application Support/twtxt/config. Consult get_app_dir to find out the config directory for other operating systems.
Here’s an example conf file, showing every currently supported option:
[twtxt]
nick = buckket
twtfile = ~/twtxt.txt
twturl = http://example.org/twtxt.txt
check_following = True
use_pager = False
use_cache = True
porcelain = False
limit_timeline = 20
timeout = 5.0
sorting = descending
pre_tweet_hook = "scp buckket@example.org:~/public_html/twtxt.txt {twtfile}"
post_tweet_hook = "scp {twtfile} buckket@example.org:~/public_html/twtxt.txt"
# post_tweet_hook = "aws s3 {twtfile} s3://mybucket.org/twtxt.txt --acl public-read --storage-class REDUCED_REDUNDANCY --cache-control 'max-age=60,public'"
[following]
bob = https://example.org/bob.txt
alice = https://example.org/alice.txt[twtxt] section:
Option: |
Type: |
Default: |
Help: |
|---|---|---|---|
nick |
TEXT |
your nick, will be displayed in your timeline |
|
twtfile |
PATH |
path to your local twtxt file |
|
twturl |
TEXT |
URL to your public twtxt file |
|
check_following |
BOOL |
True |
try to resolve URLs when listing followings |
use_pager |
BOOL |
False |
use a pager (less) to display your timeline |
use_cache |
BOOL |
True |
cache remote twtxt files locally |
porcelain |
BOOL |
False |
style output in an easy-to-parse format |
limit_timeline |
INT |
20 |
limit amount of tweets shown in your timeline |
timeout |
FLOAT |
5.0 |
maximal time a http request is allowed to take |
sorting |
TEXT |
descending |
sort timeline either descending or ascending |
pre_tweet_hook |
TEXT |
command to be executed before tweeting |
|
post_tweet_hook |
TEXT |
command to be executed after tweeting |
pre_tweet_hook and post_tweet_hook are very useful if you want to push your twtxt file to a remote (web) server. Check the example above tho see how it’s used with scp.
[followings] section:
This section holds all your followings as nick, URL pairs. You can edit this section manually or use the follow/unfollow commands of twtxt for greater comfort.
Format specification
The central component of sharing information, i.e. status updates, with twtxt is a simple text file containing all the status updates of a single user. One status per line, each of which is equipped with an ISO 8601 date/time string followed by a TAB character (\t) to separate it from the actual text. A specific ordering of the statuses is not mandatory.
The file must be encoded with UTF-8 and must use LF (\n) as line separators.
A status should consist of up to 140 characters, longer status updates are technically possible but discouraged. twtxt will warn the user if a newly composed status update exceeds this limit, and it will also shorten incoming status updates by default. Also note that a status may not contain any control characters.
Mentions are embedded within the text in either @<source.nick source.url> or @<source.url> format and should be expanded by the client, when rendering the tweets. The source.url is available to provide a way to discover new twtxt.txt files and distinguish between multiple users using the same nickname locally. The source.url can be interpreted as a TWTXT URI.
Take a look at this example file:
2016-02-04T13:30+01 You can really go crazy here! ┐(ﾟ∀ﾟ)┌
2016-02-03T23:05+01 @<example http://example.org/twtxt.txt> welcome to twtxt!
2016-02-01T11:00+01 This is just another example.
2015-12-12T12:00+01 Fiat lux!Contributions
A web-based directory of twtxt users by reednj: http://twtxt.reednj.com/
A web-based directory of twtxt users by xena: https://twtxtlist.cf
A web-based twtxt feed hoster for the masses by plomlompom: https://github.com/plomlompom/htwtxt
A twtxt-to-atom converter in sh by erlehmann: http://news.dieweltistgarnichtso.net/bin/twtxt2atom
A twitter-to-twtxt converter in node.js by DracoBlue: https://gist.github.com/DracoBlue/488466eaabbb674c636f
A port to node.js / npm by Melvin Carvalho: https://github.com/webize/twtxt
License
twtxt is released under the MIT License. See the bundled LICENSE file for details.
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