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
• Installation
• Usage
• Configuration
• Format specification
• Contributions
• License

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Features

• A beautiful command-line interface thanks to click.
• Asynchronous HTTP requests
• 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 the latest npm and node
2. Install this package using npm:

$ npm install -g twtxt

3. Run twtxt quickstart. :)

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?

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 it’s configuration. Consult get_app_dir to find out the config directory for other operating systems.

Note: The npm version uses json instead of an ini.

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

{
  "user": "melvincarvalho",
  "twtfile": "/home/user/twtxt.txt",
  "limit_timeline": "20",
  "following": [
    {
      "user": "twtxt",
      "uri": "https://buckket.org/twtxt_news.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
limit_timeline	INT	20	limit amount of tweets shown in your timeline
post_tweet_hook	TEXT		command to be executed after tweeting

post_tweet_hook is 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.

Take a look at this example file:

2016-02-04T13:30+01 You can really go crazy here! ┐(ﾟ∀ﾟ)┌
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 twitter-to-twtxt converter in node.js by DracoBlue: https://gist.github.com/DracoBlue/488466eaabbb674c636f

License

twtxt is released under the MIT License. See the bundled LICENSE file for details.