ActivityPump

Version 0.1.0

This is the ActivityPump. It's social infrastructure that models most of what people want to do with social networks: the social graph, activity streams, and so on.

License

Copyright 2011-2012, StatusNet Inc.

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.

What's it for?

I post something and my followers see it. That's the rough idea behind the pump.

There's an API defined in the API.md file. It uses activitystrea.ms JSON as the main data and command format.

You can post almost anything that can be represented with activity streams -- short or long text, bookmarks, images, video, audio, events, geo checkins. You can follow friends, create lists of people, and so on.

The software is useful for at least these scenarios:

• Mobile-first social networking
• Activity stream functionality for an existing app
• Experimenting with social software

Version 0.2.0 will have a Web UI, which will probably make the whole thing much more enjoyable.

Installation

You'll need three things to get started:

• node.js 0.8.0 or higher
• npm 1.1.0 or higher
• A database server (see below)

To install the software, you can clone the git repository, so:

git clone https://github.com/e14n/activitypump.git

You can then install the dependencies using npm:

cd activitypump
npm install

To test the install, run:

npm test

Database setup

ActivityPump uses databank package to abstract out the data storage for the system. Any databank driver should work. Couchbase, MongoDB and Redis are probably the best bets for production servers, but the disk or even memory drivers can work for testing.

If you're confused, just use the MongoDB one.

You can find other drivers like so:

npm search databank

One tricky bit is that the driver you use has to be available to the databank package. There are two ways to make that work.

First, you can install globally. For example:

npm install -g databank-mongodb

Second, you can install in the databank directory.

cd activitypump/node_modules/databank
npm install databank-mongodb

Note that you also need to install and configure your database server.

Configuration

The ActivityPump uses a single config.js file in the main directory for configuration options. You can look at config.js.sample for some details.

The file is require()'d by code, so it needs to look like this:

module.exports = {
    key1: "value1",
    key2: "value2",
    // ...
};

..or like this:

exports.key1 = "value1";
exports.key2 = "value2";

It's a JavaScript file, so you can put practically anything in there.

Here are the main configuration keys.

• driver The databank driver you're using. Defaults to "disk", which is probably going to be terrible.
• params Databank driver params; see the databank driver README for details on what to put here.
• hostname The hostname of the server. Defaults to "localhost" which doesn't do much for you.
• port Port to listen on. Defaults to 31337, which is no good. You should listen on 80 or 443 if you're going to have anyone use this.
• secret A session-generating secret, server-wide password.
• noweb Hide the Web interface. Since it's disabled for this release, this shouldn't cause you any problems.
• site Name of the server, like "My great social service".
• owner Name of owning entity, if you want to link to it.
• ownerURL URL of owning entity, if you want to link to it.
• nologger If you're debugging or whatever, turn off logging. Defaults to false (leave logging on).
• serverUser If you're listening on a port lower than 1024, you need to be root. Set this to the name of a user to change to after the server is listening. daemon or nobody are good choices, or you can create a user like pump and use that.
• key If you're using SSL, the path to the server key, like "/etc/ssl/private/myserver.key".
• cert If you're using SSL, the path to the server cert, like "/etc/ssl/private/myserver.crt".

Bugs

If you find bugs, you can report them here:

https://github.com/e14n/activitypump/issues

You can also email me at evan@e14n.com.