twtxt

twtxt is a decentralised, minimalist microblogging service for hackers.

So you want to get some thoughts out on the internet in a convenient and slick way while also following the gibberish of others? Instead of signing up at a closed and/or regulated microblogging platform, getting your status updates out with twtxt is as easy as putting them in a publicly accessible text file. The URL pointing to this file is your identity, your account. twtxt then tracks these text files, like a feedreader, and builds your unique timeline out of them, depending on which files you track. The format is simple, human readable, and integrates well with UNIX command line utilities.

tl;dr: twtxt is a CLI tool, as well as a format specification for self-hosted flat file based microblogging.

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Features

• A beautiful command-line interface thanks to click.
• Asynchronous HTTP requests thanks to asyncio/aiohttp and Python 3.
• Integrates well with existing tools (scp, cut, echo, date, etc.) and your shell.
• Don’t like the official client? Tweet using echo -e "`date -Im`\tHello world!" >> twtxt.txt!

Installation

Release version:

1. Make sure that you have at least Python 3.4.1 installed.
2. Install this package using pip:

$ pip3 install twtxt

Tip: Instead of installing the package globally (as root), you may want to install this package locally by passing --user to pip, make sure that you include ~/.local/bin/ in your $PATH. Using pyvenv and running twtxt from within a virtualenv is also an option!

3. Run twtxt quickstart. :)

Development version:

1. Clone the git repository:

$ git clone https://github.com/buckket/twtxt.git

2. Install the package via pip in developer mode:

$ pip3 install -e twtxt/

3. Running tests:

Run the tests against all supported python versions:

$ make test

Run the tests against a specific python version:

$ tox -e py34

Usage

twtxt features an excellent command-line interface thanks to click. Don’t hesitate to append --help or call commands without arguments to get information about all available commands, options and arguments.

Here are a few of the most common operations you may encounter when using twtxt:

Follow a source:

$ twtxt follow bob http://bobsplace.xyz/twtxt
✓ You’re now following bob.

List all sources you’re following:

$ twtxt following
➤ alice @ https://example.org/alice.txt
➤ bob @ http://bobsplace.xyz/twtxt

Unfollow a source:

$ twtxt unfollow bob
✓ You’ve unfollowed bob.

Post a status update:

$ twtxt tweet "Hello, this is twtxt!"

View your timeline:

$ twtxt timeline

➤ bob (5 minutes ago):
This is my first "tweet". :)

➤ alice (2 hours ago):
I wonder if this is a thing?

View feed of specific source:

$ twtxt view twtxt

➤ twtxt (a day ago):
Fiat Lux!

$ twtxt view http://example.org/twtxt.txt

➤ http://example.org/twtxt.txt (a day ago):
Fiat Lux!

Configuration

twtxt uses a simple INI-like configuration file. It’s recommended to use twtxt quickstart to create it. On Linux twtxt checks ~/.config/twtxt/config for its configuration. OSX uses ~/Library/Application Support/twtxt/config. Consult get_app_dir to find out the config directory for other operating systems.

Here’s an example conf file, showing every currently supported option:

[twtxt]
nick = buckket
twtfile = ~/twtxt.txt
twturl = http://example.org/twtxt.txt
check_following = True
use_pager = False
use_cache = True
porcelain = False
limit_timeline = 20
timeout = 5.0
sorting = descending
pre_tweet_hook = "scp buckket@example.org:~/public_html/twtxt.txt {twtfile}"
post_tweet_hook = "scp {twtfile} buckket@example.org:~/public_html/twtxt.txt"
# post_tweet_hook = "aws s3 {twtfile} s3://mybucket.org/twtxt.txt --acl public-read --storage-class REDUCED_REDUNDANCY --cache-control 'max-age=60,public'"

[following]
bob = https://example.org/bob.txt
alice = https://example.org/alice.txt

[twtxt] section:

Option:	Type:	Default:	Help:
nick	TEXT		your nick, will be displayed in your timeline
twtfile	PATH		path to your local twtxt file
twturl	TEXT		URL to your public twtxt file
check_following	BOOL	True	try to resolve URLs when listing followings
use_pager	BOOL	False	use a pager (less) to display your timeline
use_cache	BOOL	True	cache remote twtxt files locally
porcelain	BOOL	False	style output in an easy-to-parse format
limit_timeline	INT	20	limit amount of tweets shown in your timeline
timeout	FLOAT	5.0	maximal time a http request is allowed to take
sorting	TEXT	descending	sort timeline either descending or ascending
pre_tweet_hook	TEXT		command to be executed before tweeting
post_tweet_hook	TEXT		command to be executed after tweeting

pre_tweet_hook and post_tweet_hook are very useful if you want to push your twtxt file to a remote (web) server. Check the example above tho see how it’s used with scp.

[followings] section:

This section holds all your followings as nick, URL pairs. You can edit this section manually or use the follow/unfollow commands of twtxt for greater comfort.

Format specification

The central component of sharing information, i.e. status updates, with twtxt is a simple text file containing all the status updates of a single user. One status per line, each of which is equipped with an ISO 8601 date/time string followed by a TAB character (\t) to separate it from the actual text. A specific ordering of the statuses is not mandatory.

The file must be encoded with UTF-8 and must use LF (\n) as line separators.

A status should consist of up to 140 characters, longer status updates are technically possible but discouraged. twtxt will warn the user if a newly composed status update exceeds this limit, and it will also shorten incoming status updates by default. Also note that a status may not contain any control characters.

Mentions are embedded within the text in either @<source.nick source.url> or @<source.url> format and should be expanded by the client, when rendering the tweets. The source.url is available to provide a way to discover new twtxt.txt files and distinguish between multiple users using the same nickname locally. The source.url can be interpreted as a TWTXT URI.

Take a look at this example file:

2016-02-04T13:30+01 You can really go crazy here! ┐(ﾟ∀ﾟ)┌
2016-02-03T23:05+01 @<example http://example.org/twtxt.txt> welcome to twtxt!
2016-02-01T11:00+01 This is just another example.
2015-12-12T12:00+01 Fiat lux!

Contributions

• A web-based directory of twtxt users by reednj: http://twtxt.reednj.com/
• A web-based directory of twtxt users by xena: https://twtxtlist.cf
• A web-based twtxt feed hoster for the masses by plomlompom: https://github.com/plomlompom/htwtxt
• A twtxt-to-atom converter in sh by erlehmann: http://news.dieweltistgarnichtso.net/bin/twtxt2atom
• A twitter-to-twtxt converter in node.js by DracoBlue: https://gist.github.com/DracoBlue/488466eaabbb674c636f

- A port to node.js / npm by Melvin Carvalho: https://github.com/webize/twtxt License -------twtxt is released under the MIT License. See the bundled LICENSE file for details.