ActivityRelay

A generic LitePub message relay.

Copyleft

ActivityRelay is copyrighted, but free software, licensed under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License version 3 (AGPLv3) license. You can find a copy of it in this package as the LICENSE file.

Setup

You need at least Python 3.6 (latest version of 3.x recommended) to make use of this software. It simply will not run on older Python versions.

Download the project and install with pip (pip3 install -r requirements.txt).

Run python3 -m relay setup and answer the prompts or copy relay.yaml.example to relay.yaml and edit it as appropriate:

$ cp relay.yaml.example relay.yaml
$ $EDITOR relay.yaml

Finally, you can launch the relay:

$ python3 -m relay run

It is suggested to run this under some sort of supervisor, such as runit, daemontools, s6 or systemd. Configuration of the supervisor is not covered here, as it is different depending on which system you have available.

The bot runs a webserver, internally, on localhost at port 8080. This needs to be forwarded by nginx or similar. The webserver is used to receive ActivityPub messages, and needs to be secured with an SSL certificate inside nginx or similar. Configuration of your webserver is not discussed here, but any guide explaining how to configure a modern non-PHP web application should cover it.

Getting Started

Normally, you would direct your LitePub instance software to follow the LitePub actor found on the relay. In Pleroma this would be something like:

$ MIX_ENV=prod mix relay_follow https://your.relay.hostname/actor

Performance

Performance is very good, with all data being stored in memory and serialized to a JSON-LD object graph. Worker coroutines are spawned in the background to distribute the messages in a scatter-gather pattern. Performance is comparable to, if not superior to, the Mastodon relay software, with improved memory efficiency.

Management

You can perform a few management tasks such as peering or depeering other relays.

This will show the available management tasks:

$ python3 -m relay --help

When following remote relays, you should use the /actor endpoint as you would in Pleroma and other LitePub-compliant software.

Docker

You can run ActivityRelay with docker via the docker management script: docker.sh. Run it without arguments to see the list of commands.

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