pump.io Module for NixOS

pump.io - Social server with an ActivityStreams API.

Version 5.1.0.

What is it?

pump.io is an interesting federated social networking server. There are many public servers which you can use for free, or you can run your own. The latter option is what this document is about, specifically, how to do it on the best and most advanced operating system: NixOS.

pump.io could be merged into the main NixOS/Nixpkgs collection, but because it would have relatively few users, I would prefer not to burden the NixOS project with maintenance of this module. The good news is that it's quite simple to run modules from external out-of-tree resources. So you can easily set up and try this software by adding a few things to your configuration.nix.

About the module

The pump.io module comes in two parts, as do most NixOS service modules.

The first part is the Nix package, which is a build recipe for the software. The built package will contain a bin directory with the pump.io server and related tools. You don't really need to worry about this part.

The second part is the NixOS service module. It's like a Puppet script which sets up the configuration files according to sensible high-level options, ensures that the Nix package is installed, and adds a systemd service for it.

Requirements

You need to be running NixOS 18.03.

How to install

Add the following to your configuration.nix:

{ config, pkgs, ... }:
{
  imports = [ (builtins.fetchGit https://github.com/rvl/pump.io-nixos + "/module.nix") ];

  services.pumpio = {
    enable = true;
    secretFile = "/run/keys/pump.io-secret.txt";
    site = "Twit twit";
    owner = "me.name";
    ownerURL = "https://me.name";
    disableRegistration = false;
    dbName = "pumpio";
    port = 31337;
    sslCert = "/run/keys/snakeoil.cert";
    sslKey = "/run/keys/snakeoil.key";
  };
 
  services.mongodb.enable = true;
}

After running nixos-rebuild switch you should have a pump.io server listening https://localhost:31337/ which you can register a user on.

It is also possible to configure NGINX as a reverse proxy for pump.io, and/or run the service within a NixOS container, if you wish.

Running tests

nix build -f test.nix

Updating package version

When there is a new upstream release:

./pkgs/generate.sh VERSION
nix build -f ./pkgs/composition.nix package

This will fetch the given version of pump.io from npm and re-run node2nix.