Fingerlink/README.md

Fingerlink

General purpose WebFinger daemon and utilities for managing its served resources written in Rust.

Basic usage

The program is split into two halves: the server daemon and the editing tools.

There are lots of command line parameters built in, so always check the subcommand's help page with fingerlink help [subcommand] before using.

Every command that can alter the database defaults to dry-run mode where the actual database isn't altered. To actually save the result of a command, supply the --save flag. The program also always keeps one backup of the previous database state in case something goes wrong during writing. The editing processes can also try to reload the running server process when the --reload-server flag is supplied.

Subcommands

serve

Starts serving the database. By default, it binds to 127.0.0.1:8080, but these values can be changed by using the --bind-ip and --bind-port parameters.

The server keeps a PID file around to enable the optional auto-refresh functionality of the editing tools and to prevent accidentally running multiple instances of the server at once.

fetch

The simplest way to get new records into the database. By supplying a list of Fediverse-compatible handles, their resource data can be quickly and easily imported into the database.

The command tries to prevent multiple resources from taking the same query strings, and to help with this, there are multiple implemented strategies to handle collisions.

• terminate simply stops the import process if a collision is detected. The resources processed up to the collision are still inserted.
• skip skips over every resource that would collide with another resource already in the database
• overwrite-single-skip-multiple overwrites the old resource with the new one, but only if there's just a single already saved resource that the new resource will collide with. Otherwise, it skips. This is the default, as it's the most useful for updating old records.
• overwrite-multiple overwrites the old resource or resources that the new record collides with. Can be highly destructive, be careful!

In case you want to batch-import handles from a file, you can use the --handles-are-files flag. When it's enabled, the command opens the provided handles as files and reads their contents. One line, one query.

It can be very useful to replace the old domain in the subject field with the one that the service will run on. In this case you can supply the --new-domain parameter. It runs a very simple process

1. Takes the subject field of the returned resource and cuts off everything after the last @ sign.
2. Appends the string provided with the --new-domain parameter.
3. Puts it in the subject field instead of the old subject
4. Appends the old subject to the aliases array

list

Lists the subject field of every resource in the db

query

A simple command to get the response JSON to a query without curl. It pretty-prints the JSON to console.

Can also remove individual resources from the database when passed the --remove flag.

editor

Uses the editor defined in $EDITOR (or vi if the environment variable isn't set) to edit the JSON record returned to the provided query. Like every editor command, it runs in dry-run mode and requires the --save flag to be present to actually modify the database.

If the --create flag is present, then if the query doesn't return a resource, it creates a new blank resource to fill out and insert into the database.

init

Creates a new blank database file. If one is already present, it requires the --force flag to be present otherwise it refuses to delete the database.