Open Social Network CLI

Open Social Network CLI is the easiest way to create, update, validate, preview, and publish a sovereign Open Social Network page.

It turns the protocol into a real user flow:

1. create an identity
2. generate a private signing key
3. publish profile.json
4. publish feed.json
5. sign every post
6. preview the page locally
7. deploy to a free static host

In One Minute

Run:

npx open-social-network

The CLI asks simple questions and creates a standalone Open Social Network page project.

The generated project contains:

my-page/
├── open-social-network.config.json
├── public/
│   ├── .well-known/open-social-network.json
│   ├── assets/
│   ├── feed.json
│   ├── index.html
│   ├── page.js
│   ├── profile.json
│   └── styles.css
└── private/
    └── identity.private.jwk.json

The public/ directory is safe to deploy. The private/ directory is not.

Why This Exists

The internet has protocols for websites, domain names, email, feeds, files, and even AI tool connections.

Social identity still mostly lives inside platforms.

Open Social Network changes that by making a social profile a page on the internet. Open Social Network CLI makes that idea usable without asking people to understand JSON, cryptographic signatures, or static hosting internals.

Quick Start

Create a page:

npx open-social-network init my-page

Add a post:

cd my-page
npx open-social-network post "Hello from my sovereign Open Social Network page."

Validate signatures and protocol files:

npx open-social-network validate

Preview locally:

npx open-social-network preview

Deploy:

npx open-social-network deploy --target github

or:

npx open-social-network deploy --target cloudflare

Deployment Targets

GitHub Pages

GitHub Pages deployment uses the official GitHub CLI.

Install and log in:

gh auth login

Then deploy:

npx open-social-network deploy --target github

The CLI publishes only the generated public/ files to a gh-pages branch. It never publishes private/.

Cloudflare Pages

Cloudflare Pages deployment uses Wrangler.

Install and log in:

npm install -g wrangler
wrangler login

Then deploy:

npx open-social-network deploy --target cloudflare

The CLI runs a direct upload of the generated public/ directory.

Private Key Safety

The private key is written to:

private/identity.private.jwk.json

Back it up.

If you lose this file, you lose the ability to publish new posts for that identity.

If someone else gets this file, they can publish as that identity.

The generated .gitignore includes private/ automatically.

Commands

open-social-network init [folder]
open-social-network post "Your post" --project ./my-page
open-social-network validate --project ./my-page
open-social-network preview --project ./my-page --port 4173
open-social-network deploy --project ./my-page --target github
open-social-network deploy --project ./my-page --target cloudflare

Running open-social-network with no command starts the guided setup.

Related Repositories

• open-social-network-core - protocol primitives, schemas, and specification
• open-social-network-web - the official web aggregator
• open-social-network-page - sovereign page template

Status

Open Social Network CLI is early alpha. The current priority is simple, safe publishing for real sovereign profiles.