Proposed variable strings for self-hosting

[dgw]

Following up on our lovely little fediverse conversation that spawned from my random ideas at sopel-irc/sopel#2599 :)

To make this service self-host friendly, I see a few strings that would be helpful if made configurable:

• The domain name used in API examples and the "custom URL like this" instructional block
  • "Base URL" would be more flexible, but why enable hosting plain-HTTP services in 2024? https:// or bust!
• The "From Within" footer text
  I don't suggest making this fully customizable, but rather one of the below options:
  • A Boolean toggle that changes it to "Built by Within" (or something like that)
  • A custom string that must contain a {source} placeholder* linking to the source code, Within, or whatever would be preferred as a "we got this software from here" credit — enabling a clear distinction between "we host this" and "they wrote this"
• Who to contact in the error page message, currently hardcoded to please contact @[email protected] for help
  It's probably preferable to have self-hosted instance owners handle error reports from their own users, and only forward them upstream if it's something this project might want to do something about.
  • Simplest option is to just accept an alternate Mastodon/fediverse user identifier
  • Slightly more complex option is to take two values, a URL (not constrained to http(s)) and display text
    For example, my project might want to send people to our IRC channel using an ircs:// link

As far as implementation goes, my idle (and noobish) thought is that it'd be simplest to allow configuring these via environment variables. If an envvar is missing/empty, the software would use the current values as defaults. Variables are easy to pass in as part of spinning up the container (docker run -e, .env file, environment compose file key, plenty more) and are, I think, preferable to creating some form of configuration file within the Docker container that has to be mounted/managed.

The only thing that could make the result any easier to use would be a publicly accessible container image published on some registry, whether ghcr.io or otherwise. (But that is a wholly separate topic that deserves its own issue if it needs discussing! nix build .#docker and a docker image tag command or two works just fine, especially if a Docker noob like me could figure it out in 5 minutes.)

Thanks again for building this and putting it out there! Functionally it's already 99% of the way to what we'd want to make. 😸

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* — I'm a Rust noob, so I don't know what its placeholders look like. Consider this pseudocode!