Norsky

Norsky is a lightweight ATProto feed server that serves Norwegian posts from the Bluesky instance. It is written in Go and stores posts in a SQLite database to keep things simple. A dashboard is available at the root of the server /. The dashboard shows interesting statistics about the feed and Norwegian language posts. It is written in TypeScript using Solid.js and Tailwind CSS.

Installation

The feed server is a standalone go binary that you can run on your machine. It is also available as a Docker image.

From GitHub release

# On Linux you would typically do
curl -O https://github.com/snorremd/norsky/releases/download/v0.1.4/norsky_Linux_x86_64.tar.gz
tar -xvf norsky_Linux_x86_64.tar.gz
chmod +x norsky
# If you want to install it globally you can move it to /usr/local/bin
sudo mv norsky /usr/local/bin

Docker

docker pull ghrc.io/snorreio/norsky:latest

From go source

First install go and bun. Bun is used to build the frontend assets, go builds the application and bundles the frontend assets into the binary. Then clone the repository and build the application.

git clone https://github.com/snorremd/norsky.git
cd norsky
bun install
bun run build
go build -o norsky main.go

# If you want to install it globally you can move it to /usr/local/bin
sudo mv norsky /usr/local/bin

Usage

The feed server is a standalone application that you can run on your machine. It is also available as a Docker image.

Commands

serve      Serve the norsky feed
migrate    Run database migrations
tidy       Tidy up the database
subscribe  Log all norwegian posts to the command line
publish    Publish feeds on Bluesky
unpublish  Unpublish feeds from Bluesky
help, h    Shows a list of commands or help for one command

Example:

# Command line
norsky serve --hostname yourdomain.tld --port 8080 --database /path/to/db/feed.db

# Or docker run
docker run -d \
    --env=NORSKY_HOSTNAME="yourdomain.tld" \
    --env NORSKY_DATABASE="/db/feed.db" \
    --name norsky \
    -p 3000:3000 \
    -v /path/to/db:/db \
    ghrc.io/snorreio/norsky:latest

Development

The application has been developed using go 1.21.1 which is the required version to build the application as the go.mod file has been initialized with this version.

To get started clone the repository and run go run on the main file to list the available commands.

go run main.go --help

Structure

The application follows the standard way to structure a Go project and contains the following packages:

• main - The main package that contains the entrypoint for the application.
• cmd - The command package that contains the different commands for the application using cobra.
• server - The server package that contains setup code for initializing a Fiber server.
• db - The database package that contains the database connection, models, migrations, and queries.
• firehose - The firehose package that contains the firehose client and the firehose subscription.
• feeds - The feeds package that contains the feeds and functions that generate the feed responses.
• models - The models package that contains the models for the application.
• dist - Where goreleaser puts the release artifacts if you build the application using goreleaser locally.

Testing

Currently there are no tests for the application. The application relies heavily on channels and external services which makes it hard to test. If you have any ideas on how to test the application, please open an issue or a pull request.

Contributing

Pull requests are welcome. For major changes, please open an issue first to discuss what you would like to change. If you find a bug or have a feature request, please open an issue. I am also open to suggestions for improvements to the codebase as I'm not a golang expert.

If you want to provide feedback in private, you can send me an email at contact@snorre.io.

Release

This project uses goreleaser to build and release the application. To release a new version you need to create a new tag for the release titled vX.X.X and push it to main. This will trigger a GitHub action that builds the application for all platforms and creates a GitHub release with the artifacts. The release will list the changes since the last release based on the commit messages using conventional commits.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.

Acknowledgements

This project would not have been possible without the help of the following projects and the people behind them.

ATProto Feed Generator repository

The ATProto Feed Generator repository provides a reference implementation for generating feeds for Bluesky written in TypeScript. It was of great help when developing the feed server as I could easily parse the data types and see what the endpoints should return.

bsky-furry-feed

This repository saved my day when I realized there was no ATProto API client in the official bluesky indigo golang repository. I was looking at how the TypeScript, Python, and Ruby feed generator example projects handled feed registration and saw that they all used ATProto API clients. I could only work on this feed in my spare time and I didn't want to spend time writing an ATProto API client in Go. I found this repository and it was a great help as I could easily register the feed using their client implementation and focus on the feed server. They also made me aware of a new go library for building out a command line app, github.com/urfave/cli/v2.

blueskyfirehose

The blueskyfirehose repository and app contained a nice example of how to use a websocket client to subscribe to the Bluesky firehose. I used this as a reference when developing the firehose client for the feed server.