Eleventy-Plugin-Activity-Pub

Generate a simple, discoverable ActivityPub user for your Eleventy-powered website.

Usage

const activityPubPlugin = require('eleventy-plugin-activity-pub');

module.exports = function(eleventyConfig) {
	eleventyConfig.addPlugin(activityPubPlugin, {
		domain: 'my-domain.com',
		username: 'user',
		displayName: 'Lewis Dale',
		summary: 'This is my Eleventy website, except now its also discoverable on the Fediverse!',
	});
}

This will generate two files: a basic Actor file at my-domain/user.json, and a webfinger file at my-domain/.well-known/webfinger, both of which are can be used to discover your website as a user on the Fediverse - e.g. you can tag your blog in comments as @{user}@{domain}

Aliasing an existing profile

If all you want to do is create a redirect to an existing profile (so searching user@yourdomain retrieves another profile), you can use the alias option:

eleventyConfig.addPlugin(activityPubPlugin, {
  username: 'lewis',
  domain: 'lewisdale.dev',
  alias: {
    username: 'lewisdaleuk',
    domain: 'dapchat.online',
  }
});

Generating an Outbox file

Optionally, you can generate an Outbox file by including outbox: true, and the key of the collection that should appear in the outbox:

const activityPubPlugin = require('eleventy-plugin-activity-pub');

module.exports = function(eleventyConfig) {
	eleventyConfig.addPlugin(activityPubPlugin, {
		domain: 'my-domain.com',
		username: 'user',
		displayName: 'Lewis Dale',
		summary: 'This is my Eleventy website, except now its also discoverable on the Fediverse!',
		outbox: true,
		outboxCollection: 'posts'
	});
}

This will create two files:

1. /outbox, which contains the root outbox declaration
2. /outbox_page, which contains all of the collection items in descending date.

Internally, these files are generated by creating, and then quietly deleting, two template files at <source dir>/outbox/outbox.njk and <source dir>/outbox/outbox_page.njk. This is a hacky solution until I can find a cleaner way of doing this while still using user-defined collections.

Read more about the ActivityPub Outbox in the spec.

Deployment configuration

It might be necessary to manually set the content-type headers for the files we generate to ensure that they're parsed properly. Here are examples for Netlify and Vercel.

Netlify

Add this to your netlify.toml, replacing <username> with the username you define for the plugin:

[[headers]]
  for = "/<username>"
  [headers.values]
    Content-Type = "application/activity+json"

[[headers]]
  for = "/.well-known/webfinger"
  [headers.values]
    Content-Type = "application/jrd+json"

Vercel

Add this to your vercel.json, replacing <username> with the username you define for the plugin:

{
  "headers": [
    {
      "source": "/.well-known/webfinger",
      "headers": [
        {
          "key": "Content-Type",
          "value": "application/jrd+json; charset=utf-8"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "source": "/<username>",
      "headers": [
        {
          "key": "Content-Type",
          "value": "application/activity+json; charset=utf-8"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}