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SNAC(8) System Manager's Manual SNAC(8)

NAME

snac — snac administration

DESCRIPTION

The snac daemon processes messages from other servers in the Fediverse using the ActivityPub protocol.

This is the admin manual. For user operation, see snac(1). For file and data formats, see snac(5).

Special cares about your snac you must know beforehand

snac makes heavy use of hard links and link reference counts for its work, so don't even think of using it on a filesystem that doesn't support this feature. Most UNIX-like operating systems (Linux, the BSDs, the old DEC Ultrix machine in your grandfather basement, probably MacOS) support hard links on their native filesystems. Don't do fancy things like moving the subdirectories to different filesystems. Also, if you move your snac installation to another server, do it with a tool that respect hard link counts. Remember: snac is a very UNIXy program that loves hard links.

Building and Installation

A C compiler must be installed in the system, as well as the development headers and libraries for OpenSSL (or compatible) and curl. To build snac, run

make

And, after that, run as root

make install

Data storage Initialization

Once snac is properly installed on the system, designate a directory where the server and user data are to be stored. This directory must not exist yet. snac must always be run as a regular user; you can create one for it or use your own. To initialize the data storage, execute

snac init $HOME/snac-data

A small set of questions will be asked regarding the installation, specially the host name it will run under, the local network address and port snac will listen to, the optional path prefix and possibly other things.

You can launch the snac process by running

snac httpd $HOME/snac-data

Use a web browser to connect to the specified address and port. You should see a greeting page.

Log messages are sent to the standard error stream. By default, only relevant information is written there. You can increase the debugging level by editing the 'dbglevel' field in the server.json file or by setting a numeric value between 0 and 3 to the DEBUG environment variable, see below.

If you operate a Linux systemd-enabled system or OpenBSD, there are startup scripts and configuration data in the examples directory. For other operating systems, please read the appropriate documentation on how to install a daemon as a non-root service.

Upgrading to a new version

Sometimes, the data storage disk layout changes between versions. If there is such a change, snac will refuse to run and require an upgrade. Do this by running

snac upgrade $HOME/snac-data

Take special care to execute this upgrade operation without any snac processes serving on the same folder. You can break everything. I know this because Tyler knows this.

Server Setup

An http server with TLS and proxying support must already be installed and configured. snac runs as a daemon and listens on a TCP/IP socket, preferrably on a local interface. It can serve the full domain or only a directory. The http server must be configured to route to the snac socket all related traffic and also the webfinger standard address. The Host header must be propagated. See the examples below.

Adding Users

Users must be created from the command line. You can do it by running

snac adduser $HOME/snac-data

All needed data will be prompted for. There is no artificial limit on the number of users that can be created.

Customization

The server.json configuration file allows some behaviour tuning:

The host name.
The URL path prefix.
The listen network address.
The listen network port.
The debug level. An integer value, being 0 the less verbose (the default).
The disk storage layout version. Never touch this.
Messages sent out are stored in a queue. If the posting of a messages fails, it's re-enqueued for later. This integer configures the maximum count of times the sending will be retried.
The number of minutes to wait before the failed posting of a message is retried. This is not linear, but multipled by the number of retries already done.
This is the maximum timeline entries shown in the web interface.
Entries in the timeline older that this number of days are purged. If you don't want any timeline purging and enjoy your data drives fill up with old crap and finally burst in flames, you can disable purging by setting this to 0.
Same as before, but for the user-generated entries in the local timeline.
This is a list of URLs to CSS files that will be inserted, in this order, in the HTML before the user CSS. Use these files to configure the global site layout.
If set to true, timeline caching is not done. This is only useful for debugging purposes; don't enable it unless you know what do you want, as it makes everything slower.
If running under OpenBSD, snac makes use of the enhanced security functions unveil(2) and pledge(2). Setting this to true disables their usage. These functions limit severely what an intruder can do in case of a security vulnerability, so only enable this option if something is very broken.
By setting this value, you can specify the exact number of threads snac will use when processing connections. Values lesser than 4 will be ignored.
By setting this to true, no email notification will be sent for any user.
By setting this to true, no inbox collection is done. Inbox collection helps being discovered from remote instances, but also increases network traffic.

You must restart the server to make effective these changes.

If a file named greeting.html is present in the server base directory, it will be returned whenever the base URL of the server is requested. Fill it with whatever information about the instance you want to supply to people visiting the server, like sign up requirements, site policies and such. The special %userlist% mark in the file will cause the list of users in this instance to be inserted.

Users can change a bit of information about themselves from the web interface. See snac(1) for details. Further, every user has a private CSS file in their static/style.css that can be modified to suit their needs. This file contains a copy of the style.css file in the server root and it's inserted into the HTML output. It's not easily accesible from the web interface to avoid users shooting themselves in the foot by destroying everything.

Old Data Purging

From version 2.06, there is no longer a need to add a special cron job for purging old data, as this is managed internally.

ActivityPub Support

These are the following activities and objects that snac supports:

Follow
Complete support, on input and output.
Undo
For Follow objects, on input and output.
Create
For Note objects, on input and output.
Accept
For Follow objects, on input and output.
Like
For Note objects, on input and output.
Announce
For Note objects, on input and output.
Update
For Person and Note objects, on input and output.
Delete
Supported for Note and Tomsbtone objects on input, and for Note objects on output.

The rest of activities and objects are dropped on input.

There is partial support for OrderedCollection objects in the /outbox (with the last 20 entries of the local timeline shown). No pagination is supported. Intentionally, the /followers and /following paths return empty lists.

Migrating from Mastodon

User migration from different Fediverse instances is a pain in the ass that has been implemented everywhere as a kludgy afterthought. There is not much that can be done, other than importing the list of people you follow to your new snac account.

To do this, download the user's list of accounts being followed (in CSV format) from the Mastodon web interface and execute this:

awk -F, 'NR > 1 { print $1 }' /path/to/following_accounts.csv | \
xargs -n 1 snac follow $SNAC_BASEDIR $SNAC_USER

Other Considerations

snac stores all the messages it receives as JSON files, which are usually bloated and filled with redundant information. Using a filesystem with file compression enabled (like btrfs or zfs) will probably be a good choice to store the snac data storage into.

ENVIRONMENT

Overrides the debugging level from the server 'dbglevel' configuration variable. Set it to an integer value. The higher, the deeper in meaningless verbiage you'll find yourself into.

EXAMPLES

You want to install the snac Fediverse daemon in the host example.com, that is correctly configured with a valid TLS certificate and running the nginx httpd server. The service will be installed under the fedi location. Two users, walter and jessie, will be hosted in the system. Their Fediverse presence addresses will be https://example.com/fedi/walter and https://example.com/fedi/jesse, respectively. They will be known in the Fediverse as @walter@example.com and @jesse@example.com. The snac daemon will run as the user snacusr in the system and listen to the localhost:8001 network socket. All data will be stored in the /home/snacusr/fedidata directory.

Log into the system as snacusr and execute:

snac init /home/snacusr/fedidata

Answer "example.com" to the host name question, "/fedi" to the path prefix question, "localhost" to the address and "8001" to the port.

Create the users

snac adduser /home/snacusr/fedidata walter
snac adduser /home/snacusr/fedidata jesse

Answer the questions with reasonable values.

Execute the server:

snac httpd /home/snacusr/fedidata

Edit the nginx configuration and add the following snippet to the example.com server section:

location /.well-known/webfinger {
    proxy_pass http://localhost:8001;
    proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
}

# optional
location /.well-known/nodeinfo {
    proxy_pass http://localhost:8001;
    proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
}

location /fedi {
    proxy_pass http://localhost:8001;
    proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
}

Restart the nginx daemon and connect to https://example.com/fedi/walter. The empty, default screen will be shown. Enter the admin section with the credentials defined for this user. Search people, start following them, engage in arid discussions and generally enjoy the frustrating experience of Social Media.

SEE ALSO

snac(1), snac(5)

AUTHORS

grunfink @grunfink@comam.es

LICENSE

See the LICENSE file for details.

CAVEATS

JSON files are fragile when modified by hand. Take care.

March 29, 2023 Debian