Mounting statusnet/identica as a filesystem

With the 1.5.12 release of libferris hot off the presses, I thought I'd blog about how to use the new statusnet mounting. I tried to do some testing against identica at the start, and managed to get myself silenced there ;) I was resurrected within hours once I put forward my case as not-a-trollbot^tm. Anyway, that led me to setup my own local statusnet server for testing against, and now libferris can mount identi.ca and also one or more local servers if you so desire.... yay!

There is a little bit of setup required, web keys, secrets and oauth... the normal story.
The identica filesystem contains a directory for each server you have setup in ~/.ferris/identica. To update my public status I just write to the status file in my identica account:

$ echo "this is coming from the console via libferris, mounting the public statusnet ;-p" \
| ferris-redirect identica://identica/status

To see what has been going on I can list the timeline directory, using "-0" to get libferris to tell me what metadata is interesting for that directory instead of viewing the protection bits and other non interesting information.

$ fls -0 identica://identica/timeline
89868729 Welcome to Identi.ca, @monkeyiq! Welcome Bot 12 Feb 2 03:53
...

There is also support for direct messaging through the filesystem, seeing retweets, friends, and mentions.

Now for the details... Configuration happens through the virtual filesystem. Each statusnet server you want to mount has it's own directory inside ~/.ferris/identica. The configuration directory lists the base URL for performing REST requests on that server and the prefix of where the webkey and secret are to live. For the public identi.ca server I have the following:

$ pwd
~/.ferris/identica/identica
$ cat rest_base
https://identi.ca/api/
$ cat token_prefix
identica

And the webkeys go in a file in ~/.ferris prefixed with the token_prefix above:
$ cat ~/.ferris/identica-api-key.txt
5045332...

I do not distribute web keys, so you need to go to http://identi.ca/settings/oauthapps and create one yourself.

If you have a private statusnet server foobar then you create ~/.ferris/identica/foobar with the REST url for it, and foobar as the token_prefix. Then put the web API key into ~/.ferris/foobar-api-key.txt.

To setup the oauth part, we use our old friend capplet-auth. Again for our foobar custom server replace the auth-with-site with foobar instead. This will give you a URL to visit to authorize your webapp (libferris) on your account. You'll be given a PIN to copy back onto the console and then you should be setup.

$ ferris-capplet-auth --auth-service identica --auth-with-site identica