Federated single-user blog

Tip

The preview of this example is available at https://fedify-blog.deno.dev/.

This project is an example of a federated single-user blog. It is built on top of the following technologies:

• Deno for runtime
• Deno KV for database
• Fresh for web framework
• Fedify for federation

It provides the following features:

• Publish a new post
• View a post and its comments
• View a list of posts
• Federate with other servers in the fediverse
  • Fediverse users can follow/unfollow your blog
  • Followers can see your posts in their timelines
  • Followers can reply to your posts

Usage

Start the project with the following command:

deno task start

The above command will start the server on port 8000. You can access the blog at http://localhost:8000/, but in order to federate your server with other servers in the fediverse, you need to expose your server with a public domain name in HTTPS. There are plenty of ways to do this, but one of the easiest ways for development is to use ngrok:¹

ngrok http 8000

At first, you need to set up your blog profile by visiting the root URL of your blog:

After that, you can start federating your blog with other servers through your fediverse handle:

Where to start reading

In general, this project is a typical Fresh web app, except that it delegates federation-related tasks to the Fedify library. So, if you are not familiar with Fresh at all, you may want to start with the Fresh documentation.

The most of the federation-related code is in the federation/mod.ts file. This file registers many callbacks to the Fedify library, which are called when the server receives a federation-related request.

There are few code that interacts with the Fedify library from the Fresh app. For example, routes/posts/index.ts file contains logic to publish a new post, and there is few lines that enqueue a Create activity to the outbox:

// Gets a federation context for enqueueing an activity:
const fedCtx = await federation.createContext(req);
// Enqueues a `Create` activity to the outbox:
await fedCtx.sendActivity(
  { handle: blog.handle },
  await getFollowersAsActors(),
  new Create({
    // (omitted for brevity)
  }),
);

Lastly, you'll probably wonder how the federation object is integrated with the Fresh app. The answer is in the routes/_middleware.ts file. This file contains a Fresh middleware that intercepts federation-related requests and passes them to the federation object.

We did the best to keep the federation-related logic elaborated in comments, so we hope you can understand the code by reading the comments too.

Footnotes

1. To grasp the concept of ngrok and how to use it, please refer the official quick start guide. ↩