bovine

Bovine

Bovine is a basic utility library for the Fediverse. It can be used both to build ActivityPub Client applications and ActivityPub Servers. In addition to ActivityPub support, it also provides utilities to deal with webfinger, nodeinfo, and HTTP Signatures.

The bovine library can just be installed via pip

pip install bovine

Documentation including tutorials is available at ReadTheDocs.

A quick Fediverse server with docker compose

Using the bovine docker image, the following docker compose file, and a service such as ngrok allowing one to expose a local port to the internet, one can create a python shell that allows one to use bovine to interact with the Fediverse

services:
  bovine:
    image: helgekr/bovine
    environment:
    - "BOVINE_TEST_HOSTNAME=${NGROK_HOSTNAME}"
    - "BOVINE_TEST_PROTOCOL=https"
    volumes: ["bovine_shared:/bovine"]
    ports: ["5000:80"]
    command: python -mbovine.testing serve --port 80 --reload --save_config=/bovine/config.toml
  repl:
    image: helgekr/bovine
    command: python -mbovine.testing shell --load_config=/bovine/config.toml
    depends_on: [bovine]
    profiles: ["repl"]
    volumes: ["bovine_shared:/bovine"]
volumes:
  bovine_shared:

When using ngrok with ngrok http 5000, you can directly run the above file via

NGROK_HOSTNAME=$(curl --silent http://127.0.0.1:4040/api/tunnels  | jq '.tunnels[0].public_url' | sed "s|https://||g" | sed 's|"||g') docker compose run repl

otherwise you will have to set the variable BOVINE_TEST_HOSTNAME to the appropriate host.

By using

>>> helge = await webfinger("acct:[e-mail]")
>>> inbox = (await actor.get(helge))["inbox"]
>>> helge
"https://mymath.rocks/endpoints/SYn3cl_N4HAPfPHgo2x37XunLEmhV9LnxCggcYwyec0"

one can resolve an acct uri to the actor's uri and then record its inbox. Then one can create a message via

>>> mention = {"href": helge, "type": "Mention"}
>>> note = object_factory.note(to={helge}, content="Writing a README thus talking to myself", tag=[mention]).as_public().build()
>>> note
{
    "@context": "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
    "type": "Note",
    "attributedTo": "https://8fc-2003-c1-c73c-a901-b426-f511-88e5-77e3.ngrok-free.app/buttercup",
    "to": ["https://mymath.rocks/endpoints/SYn3cl_N4HAPfPHgo2x37XunLEmhV9LnxCggcYwyec0", "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"],
    "id": "https://8fc-2003-c1-c73c-a901-b426-f511-88e5-77e3.ngrok-free.app/HFL5hpzi",
    "published": "2024-11-24T12:30:54Z",
    "content": "Writing a README thus talking to myself",
}

By then running

>>> await actor.post(inbox, activity_factory.create(note).build())
<ClientResponse(https://mymath.rocks/endpoints/SYONtD8yAKPapRuifwDJ8P0OhcuB7ntjkHdxh_OkrWQ) [202 None]>

one can post the message. It should then appear in your Fedi client

One can view messages received in the inbox via

docker compose logs -f

Further information on the testing server can be found in Using bovine with the fediverse-pasture in the documentation.

Feedback

Issues about bovine should be filed as an issue.

Running BDD Tests

bovine uses the fediverse-features to provide BDD tests. These can be run using the run_behave.sh script.

Contributing

If you want to contribute, you can start by working on issues labeled Good first issue. The tech stack is currently based on asynchronous python, using the following components:

• aiohttp for http requests.
• quart as a webserver.
• cryptography.
• pytest for testing.
• ruff for linting.