autost

questions and contributions welcome :3

want to archive your chosts on your website but have too many for the cohost web component? want something like cohost-dl except you can keep posting? what if your blog engine had the same posting and reading experience as cohost? what if you could follow people with rss/atom feeds and see their posts on a chronological timeline? what if you could share their posts too?

getting started

autost is a single program you run in your terminal (autost).

go to the releases page to download or install autost!

got nix? you can run autost without any extra setup using nix run github:delan/autost!

go to CHANGELOG.md to find out what changed in each new release.

for more docs, check out the autost book, which you can also render locally:

$ cd sites/docs
$ cargo run render
  - or -
$ cargo run server

how to make a new site

$ autost new sites/example.com  # example (can be anywhere)
$ cd sites/example.com

how to dump your own chosts

cohost “projects” are the things with handles like @staff that you can have more than one of.

$ cd sites/example.com
$ autost cohost2json projectName path/to/chosts

you may want to dump private or logged-in-only chosts, be they your own or those of people you’ve followed or reblogged. in this case, you will need to set COHOST_COOKIE to the value of your “connect.sid” cookie as follows, and switch projects in the cohost web ui, otherwise you won’t see everything!

$ read -r COHOST_COOKIE; export COHOST_COOKIE  # optional

how to convert chosts to posts

$ cd sites/example.com
$ autost cohost2autost path/to/chosts

or to convert specific chosts only:

$ cd sites/example.com
$ autost cohost2autost path/to/chosts 123456.json 234567.json

how to render your posts to pages

$ cd sites/example.com
$ autost render

or to render specific posts only:

$ cd sites/example.com
$ autost render posts/123456.html posts/10000000.md

how to include or exclude specific chosts

1. set the interesting_archived_threads_list_path or excluded_archived_threads_list_path to a text file
2. in the text file, add a line for each chost with the original cohost url

how to add tags to converted chosts

1. set the archived_thread_tags_path to a text file
2. in the text file, add a line for each chost as follows:

https://cohost.org/project/post/123456-slug tag,another tag

how to start the server so you can post

warning: this server has no password and no sandboxing yet! do not expose it to the internet!

$ cd sites/example.com
$ autost server

how to reply to a post on another blog

this works with any blog that uses microformats2 h-entry. see @nex3’s Reblogging posts with h-entry for more details on how this works.

$ cd sites/example.com
$ autost import https://nex-3.com/blog/reblogging-posts-with-h-entry/
  INFO autost::command::import: click here to reply: http://[::1]:8420/posts/compose?reply_to=imported/1.html

if you run autost import with the same url again, the existing imported post will be updated. you can also use autost reimport to update an existing imported post:

$ cd sites/example.com
$ autost reimport posts/imported/1.html

how to create an attachment from a local file

warning: this command does not strip any exif data yet, including your gps location!

$ cd sites/example.com
$ autost attach path/to/diffie.jpg

how to deploy

the best way to upload your site to a web host depends on if you have chosts you might not want people to see. if you upload everything, someone can count from 1.html to 9999999.html and find all of your chosts.

if you want to upload everything, you can use rsync directly (note the trailing slash):

$ cd sites/example.com
$ rsync -av site/ host:/var/www/example.com

if you want to only upload the chosts you have curated, you can use site/deploy.sh (where path/to/interesting.txt is your interesting_output_filenames_list_path):

$ cd sites/example.com
$ site/deploy.sh host:/var/www/example.com path/to/interesting.txt -n  # dry run
$ site/deploy.sh host:/var/www/example.com path/to/interesting.txt     # wet run

suggested workflow

if you just want to back up your chosts, make an autost site for each cohost project, like sites/@catball and sites/@rats.

if you want to do anything more involved, you should make a staging and production version of your autost site, like sites/staging and sites/production:

• to render your site, cd sites/staging; autost render
• to see what changed, colordiff -ru sites/production sites/staging
• if you’re happy with the changes, rsync -a sites/staging sites/production
• and finally to deploy, cd sites/production and see “how to deploy”

that way, you can catch unintentional changes or autost bugs, and you have a backup of your site in case anything goes wrong.

troubleshooting

if something goes wrong, you can set RUST_LOG or RUST_BACKTRACE to get more details:

$ export RUST_LOG=autost=debug
$ export RUST_LOG=autost=trace
$ export RUST_BACKTRACE=1

building autost yourself

if you want to tinker with autost, install rust, then download and build the source (see below). to run autost, replace autost in the commands above with cargo run -r --.

$ git clone https://github.com/delan/autost.git
$ cd autost

if you've got nix installed, there's also a devshell you can jump into with nix-shell or nix develop that has rust included. you can also build the nix derivation for autost with nix build.

roadmap

1. archive your chosts
   • download chosts from the api (cohost2json)
   • import chosts from the api (cohost2autost)
   • import chosts from cohost-dl
   • import chosts from your cohost data export
   • extract and render chost content
     • download and rewrite cohost cdn links
     • extract cohost-rendered chost content
     • render asks
     • render image attachments
     • render audio attachments
     • render attachment rows (new post editor)
   • generate the main page (index.html)
   • generate chost pages (<postId>.html)
   • generate tag pages (tagged/<tag>.html)
2. curate your chosts
   • select tags to include on the main page (interesting_tags)
   • select posts to include on the main page (interesting_archived_threads_list_path)
   • select posts to exclude from the main page (excluded_archived_threads_list_path)
   • deploy only included posts, to avoid enumeration (interesting_output_filenames_list_path)
   • generate pages for all posts, posts not yet interesting/excluded, …
   • add tags to chosts without editing the originals (archived_thread_tags_path)
   • automatically rename tags whenever encountered (tag synonyms; renamed_tags)
   • add tags whenever a tag is encountered (tag implications; implied_tags)
3. compose new posts (we are here!)
   • compose simple posts
   • compose replies
   • upload attachments
4. follow others
   • generate atom feeds (index.feed.xml, tagged/<tag>.feed.xml)
   • subscribe to feeds
   • single reverse chronological timeline
   • share and reply to posts