granary

The social web translator. Fetches and converts data between social networks, HTML and JSON with microformats2, ActivityStreams/ActivityPub, Atom, JSON Feed, and more.

• About
• Using
  • Using the REST API
  • Using the library
• Troubleshooting/FAQ
• Future work
• Development
• Release instructions
• Related work
• Changelog

About

Granary is a library and REST API that fetches and converts between a wide variety of social data sources and formats:

• Facebook, Flickr, GitHub, Instagram, Mastodon, and Twitter native APIs
• Instagram and Facebook scraped HTML
• ActivityStreams 1.0 and 2.0 JSON, including ActivityPub
• HTML and JSON with microformats2
• Atom, RSS 2.0, JSON Feed
• Plain XML
• Bluesky/AT Protocol
• Nostr, with many NIPs

Free yourself from silo API chaff and expose the sweet social data foodstuff inside in standard formats and protocols!

Here's how to get started:

• Granary is available on PyPi. Install with pip install granary.
• Getting started docs.
• Reference docs.
• REST API and demo app at granary.io.
• Source code on GitHub.

License: This project is placed in the public domain.

Using

The library and REST API are both based on the OpenSocial Activity Streams service. Let's start with an example. This code using the library:

from granary import twitter
...
tw = twitter.Twitter(ACCESS_TOKEN_KEY, ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET)
tw.get_activities(group_id='@friends')

is equivalent to this HTTP GET request:

https://granary.io/twitter/@me/@friends/@app/
  ?access_token_key=ACCESS_TOKEN_KEY&access_token_secret=ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET

They return the authenticated user's Twitter stream, ie tweets from the people they follow. Here's the JSON output:

{
  "itemsPerPage": 10,
  "startIndex": 0,
  "totalResults": 12,
  "items": [{
      "verb": "post",
      "id": "tag:twitter.com,2013:374272979578150912",
      "url": "http://twitter.com/evanpro/status/374272979578150912",
      "content": "Getting stuff for barbecue tomorrow. No ribs left! Got some nice tenderloin though. (@ Metro Plus Famille Lemay) http://t.co/b2PLgiLJwP",
      "actor": {
      "username": "evanpro",
        "displayName": "Evan Prodromou",
        "description": "Prospector.",
        "url": "http://twitter.com/evanpro",
      },
      "object": {
        "tags": [{
            "url": "http://4sq.com/1cw5vf6",
            "startIndex": 113,
            "length": 22,
            "objectType": "article"
          }, "..."],
      },
    }, "..."]
  "..."
}

The request parameters are the same for both, all optional: USER_ID is a source-specific id or @me for the authenticated user. GROUP_ID may be @all, @friends (currently identical to @all), @self, @search, or @blocks; APP_ID is currently ignored; best practice is to use @app as a placeholder.

Paging is supported via the startIndex and count parameters. They're self explanatory, and described in detail in the OpenSearch spec and OpenSocial spec.

When using the GROUP_ID @search (for platforms that support it — currently Twitter and Instagram), provide a search string via the q parameter. The API is loosely based on the OpenSearch spec, the OpenSocial Core Container spec, and the OpenSocial Core Gadget spec.

Output data is JSON Activity Streams 1.0 objects wrapped in the OpenSocial envelope, which puts the activities in the top-level items field as a list and adds the itemsPerPage, totalCount, etc. fields.

Most Facebook requests and all Twitter, Instagram, and Flickr requests will need OAuth access tokens. If you're using Python on Google App Engine, oauth-dropins is an easy way to add OAuth client flows for these sites. Otherwise, here are the sites' authentication docs: Facebook, Flickr, Instagram, Twitter.

If you get an access token and pass it along, it will be used to sign and authorize the underlying requests to the sources providers. See the demos on the REST API endpoints above for examples.

Using the REST API

The endpoints above all serve the OpenSocial Activity Streams REST API. Request paths are of the form:

/USER_ID/GROUP_ID/APP_ID/ACTIVITY_ID?startIndex=...&count=...&format=FORMAT&access_token=...

All query parameters are optional. FORMAT may be as1 (the default), as2, atom, html, jsonfeed, mf2-json, rss, or xml (the default). atom supports a boolean reader query parameter for toggling rendering appropriate to feed readers, e.g. location is rendered in content when reader=true (the default). The rest of the path elements and query params are described above.

Errors are returned with the appropriate HTTP response code, e.g. 403 for Unauthorized, with details in the response body.

By default, responses are cached and reused for 10m without re-fetching the source data. (Instagram responses are cached for 60m.) You can prevent this by adding the cache=false query parameter to your request.

Include the shares=false query parameter to omit shares, eg Twitter retweets, from the results.

To use the REST API in an existing ActivityStreams/ActivityPub client, you'll need to hard-code exceptions for the domains you want to use e.g. facebook.com, and redirect HTTP requests to the corresponding endpoint above.

Facebook and Instagram are disabled in the REST API entirely, sadly.

Using the library

See the example above for a quick start guide.

Clone or download this repo into a directory named granary. Each source works the same way. Import the module for the source you want to use, then instantiate its class by passing the HTTP handler object. The handler should have a request attribute for the current HTTP request.

The useful methods are get_activities() and get_actor(), which returns the current authenticated user (if any). See the full reference docs for details. All return values are Python dicts of decoded ActivityStreams 1 JSON.

The microformats2.*_to_html() functions are also useful for rendering ActivityStreams 1 objects as nicely formatted HTML.

Troubleshooting/FAQ

Check out the oauth-dropins Troubleshooting/FAQ section. It's pretty comprehensive and applies to this project too.

Future work

We'd love to add more sites! Off the top of my head, YouTube, Tumblr, WordPress.com, Sina Weibo, Qzone, and RenRen would be good candidates. If you're looking to get started, implementing a new site is a good place to start. It's pretty self contained and the existing sites are good examples to follow, but it's a decent amount of work, so you'll be familiar with the whole project by the end.

Development

Pull requests are welcome! Feel free to ping me in #indieweb-dev with any questions.

First, fork and clone this repo. Then, install the Google Cloud SDK and run gcloud components install beta cloud-datastore-emulator to install the datastore emulator. Once you have them, set up your environment by running these commands in the repo root directory:

gcloud config set project granary-demo
python3 -m venv local
source local/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
# needed to serve static files locally
ln -s local/lib/python3*/site-packages/oauth_dropins/static oauth_dropins_static

Now, run the tests to check that everything is set up ok:

gcloud beta emulators datastore start --use-firestore-in-datastore-mode --no-store-on-disk --host-port=localhost:8089 --quiet < /dev/null >& /dev/null &
python3 -m unittest discover

Finally, run the web app locally with flask run:

GAE_ENV=localdev FLASK_ENV=development flask run -p 8080

Open localhost:8080 and you should see the granary home page!

If you want to work on oauth-dropins at the same time, install it in editable mode with pip install -e <path to oauth-dropins repo>. You'll also need to update the oauth_dropins_static symlink, which is needed for serving static file handlers locally: ln -sf <path-to-oauth-dropins-repo>/oauth_dropins/static oauth_dropins_static.

To deploy to production:

gcloud -q beta app deploy --no-cache granary-demo *.yaml

The docs are built with Sphinx, including apidoc, autodoc, and napoleon. Configuration is in docs/conf.py To build them, first install Sphinx with pip install sphinx. (You may want to do this outside your virtualenv; if so, you'll need to reconfigure it to see system packages with virtualenv --system-site-packages local.) Then, run docs/build.sh.

Release instructions

Here's how to package, test, and ship a new release. (Note that this is largely duplicated in the oauth-dropins readme too.)

1. Run the unit tests.

   source local/bin/activate.csh
   CLOUDSDK_CORE_PROJECT=granary-demo gcloud beta emulators datastore start --use-firestore-in-datastore-mode --no-store-on-disk --host-port=localhost:8089 < /dev/null >& /dev/null &
   sleep 5
   python3 -m unittest discover
   kill %1
   deactivate

2. Bump the version number in setup.py and docs/conf.py. git grep the old version number to make sure it only appears in the changelog. Change the current changelog entry in README.md for this new version from unreleased to the current date.
3. Bump the oauth-dropins version specifier in setup.py to the most recent version.
4. Build the docs. If you added any new modules, add them to the appropriate file(s) in docs/source/. Then run ./docs/build.sh. Check that the generated HTML looks fine by opening docs/_build/html/index.html and looking around.
5. git commit -am 'release vX.Y'
6. Upload to test.pypi.org for testing.

   python3 setup.py clean build sdist
   setenv ver X.Y
   source local/bin/activate.csh
   twine upload -r pypitest dist/granary-$ver.tar.gz

7. Install from test.pypi.org.

   cd /tmp
   python3 -m venv local
   source local/bin/activate.csh
   pip3 uninstall granary # make sure we force Pip to use the uploaded version
   pip3 install --upgrade pip
   pip3 install mf2py==1.1.2
   pip3 install -i https://test.pypi.org/simple --extra-index-url https://pypi.org/simple granary==$ver
   deactivate

8. Smoke test that the code trivially loads and runs.

   source local/bin/activate.csh
   python3
   # run test code below
   deactivate

   Test code to paste into the interpreter:

   import json
   from granary import github
   github.__file__  # check that it's in the virtualenv
   
   g = github.GitHub('XXX')  # insert a GitHub personal OAuth access token
   a = g.get_activities()
   print(json.dumps(a, indent=2))
   
   from granary import atom
   print(atom.activities_to_atom(a, {}))

9. Tag the release in git. In the tag message editor, delete the generated comments at bottom, leave the first line blank (to omit the release "title" in github), put ### Notable changes on the second line, then copy and paste this version's changelog contents below it.

   git tag -a v$ver --cleanup=verbatim
   git push && git push --tags

10. Click here to draft a new release on GitHub. Enter vX.Y in the Tag version box. Leave Release title empty. Copy ### Notable changes and the changelog contents into the description text box.
11. Upload to pypi.org!

    twine upload dist/granary-$ver.tar.gz

12. Build the docs on Read the Docs: first choose latest in the drop-down, then click Build Version.
13. On the Versions page, check that the new version is active, If it's not, activate it in the Activate a Version section.

Related work

Apache Streams is a similar project that translates between storage systems and database as well as social schemas. It's a Java library, and its design is heavily structured. Here's the list of formats it supports. It's mainly used by People Pattern.

Gnip similarly converts social network data to ActivityStreams and supports many more source networks. Unfortunately, it's commercial, there's no free trial or self-serve signup, and plans start at $500.

DataSift looks like broadly the same thing, except they offer self-serve, pay as you go billing, and they use their own proprietary output format instead of ActivityStreams. They're also aimed more at data mining as opposed to individual user access.

Cliqset's FeedProxy used to do this kind of format translation, but unfortunately it and Cliqset died.

Facebook used to officially support ActivityStreams, but that's also dead.

There are a number of products that download your social network data, normalize it, and let you query and visualize it. SocialSafe is one, although the SSL certificate is currently out of date. ThinkUp was an open source product, but shuttered on 18 July 2016. There's also the lifelogging/lifestream aggregator vein of projects that pull data from multiple source sites. Storytlr is a good example. It doesn't include Facebook, or Instagram, but does include a number of smaller source sites. There are lots of others, e.g. the Lifestream WordPress plugin. Unfortunately, these are generally aimed at end users, not developers, and don't usually expose libraries or REST APIs.

On the open source side, there are many related projects. php-mf2-shim adds microformats2 to Facebook and Twitter's raw HTML. sockethub is a similar "polyglot" approach, but more focused on writing than reading.

Changelog

6.1 - unreleased

REST API breaking changes:

Twitter is dead, at least in the REST API.

Non-breaking changes:

• Add new nostr module!
• as1:
  • Add get_owner, targets.
  • Add accept, reject, stop-following to VERBS_WITH_OBJECT and remove repost, it's not an AS1 verb.
• as2:
  • to_as1:
    • Improve Video handling: support Link objects in url, extract stream URLs and types from link tags.
    • Coerce non-float latitude and longitude to float, raise ValueError on failure.
    • Put image attachments into image as well as attachments (bridgy-fed#429).
  • Add new TYPES_WITH_OBJECT constant.
  • Add new get_urls, address functions.
  • Improve Content-Type compatibility with application/ld+json; profile="https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams".
  • Bug fix for Undo activities with bare string id objects.
  • Revise HTML in PropertyValue attachments on actors to include full URL in anchro text to be compatible with Mastodon's profile link verification.
• atom:
  • activities_to_atom etc:
    • Bug fix, handle bare string URL image values.
    • Bug fix, remove incorrect type="application/atom+xml" from rel="self" link in entry.
    • Render objectType: comment attachments.
  • Bug fixes in activity_to_atom/activities_to_atom for dict-valued url fields.
  • Render images in article/note attachments.
  • Render objectType: service attachments, eg Bluesky custom feeds.
• bluesky:
  • Implement Bluesky API class, including get_activities.
  • Update for app.bsky lexicons refactor.
  • Convert reposts, quotes, inline links, attached links, and mentions, both directions. Includes Bluesky facet (rich text) support.
  • Handle quote posts with attached images, both directions.
  • from_as1: handle link tags without start/end indices.
  • to_as1: add new type kwarg.
  • to_as1: generate staging.bsky.app profile and post URLs.
  • to_as1: propagate profile did into actor id.
  • to_as1: add unimplemented stub for custom feeds, eg app.bsky.feed.defs#generatorView.
  • Add as1_to_profile.
• jsonfeed:
  • activities_to_jsonfeed bug fix, handle bare string values for image and stream.
• mastodon:
  • status_to_object: add/fix alt text handling for images.
• microformats2:
  • json_to_object:
    • Improve handling of items with multiple types by using post type discovery more aggressively.
  • object_to_json:
    • Bug fix, handle bare string URL image values.
  • Include objectType: service attachments, eg Bluesky custom feeds, in JSON and HTML output.

6.0 - 2023-03-22

Breaking changes:

• as2:
  • Interpret bare string object, inReplyTo, etc values as ids, convert them to bare strings or id instead of url.
• microformats2:
  • Convert simple string in-reply-to, repost-of, like-of etc values to AS1 bare strings or ids instead of urls.

Non-breaking changes:

• Add new bluesky module for Bluesky/AT Protocol!
• as1:
  • Add the organization object type and ACTOR_TYPES constant (based on AS2).
  • Add new get_ids, get_object, and get_objects functions.
• activity_changed: ignore inReplyTo.author (snarfed/bridgy#1338)
• as2:
  • Support converting between AS1 stop-following and AS2 Undo Follow.
  • Support AS2 Accept and Reject for follows as well as event RSVPs.
  • Add support for the Question (ie poll), Organization, and Delete object types.
  • Convert to/cc to/from AS1 to for public and unlisted.
  • Handle type: Document video attachments like Mastodon emits.
  • from_as1: bug fix for image objects with url and value fields (for alt text).
  • from_as1: bug fix, handle bare string URL image values.
  • from_as1: convert urls.displayName to attachment.name (bridgy-fed#331).
  • from_as1: preserve inReplyTo object values as objects, inline single-element lists down down to just single element.
  • to_as1: use objectType: featured for first image in image field.
  • to_as1: populate actor into object.author for Updates as well as Creates.
  • to_as1: convert Mastodon profile metadata PropertyValue attachments to url composite objects with displayName.
  • Preserve to and cc values when converting both directions.
• atom:
  • Bug fix for rendering image attachments without image field to Atom.
  • Bug fix for published and updated in entries with objects, eg likes, reposts, RSVPs, bookmarks. Thanks @gregorlove! (#480)
  • Bug fix for content activity/ies_to_atom when object is present and empty.
  • Bug fix for objects with elements without objectType in the to field.
• flickr:
  • get_activities: add support for the count kwarg.
• github:
  • get_activities: add support for the count kwarg.
• jsonfeed:
  • Switch from white-space: pre CSS to converting newlines to <br>s because some feed readers follow it strictly and don't even line wrap (#456).
• mastodon:
  • Add compatibility support for Truth Social.
  • Handle truncated JSON API responses.
• microformats2:
  • json_to_object: drop backward compatibility support for like and repost properties. Background discussion.
  • json_to_object: add new rel_urls kwarg to allow attaching displayNames to urls based on HTML text or title attribute (bridgy-fed#331).
  • Add new json_to_activities function.
  • hcard_to_html/maybe_linked_name: when name is missing, use pretty URL as visible text.
  • Support the h-card org property.
  • json_to_object: handle composite rsvp property value.
  • json_to_object: bug fix when fetch_mf2 is True, handle when we run the authorship algorithm and fetch an author URL that has a u-photo with alt.
• rss:
  • from_activities: fix item ordering to match input activities.

5.0 - 2022-12-03

Breaking changes:

• Drop Python 3.6 support. Python 3.7 is now the minimum required version.
• Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon:
  • Drop get_activities cache kwarg's support for App Engine memcache interface. It's now only used as a plain dict. get_activities will now make many small modifications, so if you pass an object that implements those as API calls, you'll probably want to batch those separately.
• Twitter, Mastodon, Flickr, GitHub:
  • create/preview: support the AS1 favorite verb as well as like. (bridgy#1345)
• Atom:
  • Switch to converting AS1 id (instead of url) to Atom id.
• Reddit:
  • Implement get_actor.
• Mastodon:
  • create/preview: allow non-Mastodon replies, ie activities that include inReplyTo URLs even if none of them point to a toot. (bridgy#1321)
  • Raise requests.HTTPError with response.status_code 502 instead of JSONDecodeError on non-JSON responses. This is synthetic, but more helpful for error handling.
• microformats2:
  • object_to_json and related functions: handle all escaped HTML entities, not just & < >.
  • Unify microformats2.prefix_image_urls and prefix_video_urls into a new as1.prefix_urls function.
• RSS:
  • Remove itunes:category. It has to be one of Apple's explicit categories, which we aren't prepared to validate, so don't try.
• ActivityStreams 2:
  • Translate both url and urls from AS1 into multi-valued AS2 url field.
• Move a number of utility methods from the Source class to a new as1 module: object_type, merge_by_id, is_public, add_rsvps_to_event, get_rsvps_from_event, activity_changed, append_in_reply_to, actor_name, original_post_discovery.
• as1.original_post_discovery: remove deprecated cache kwarg.

Non-breaking changes:

• ActivityStreams 2:
  • Fix spec compliance bug: icon and image are singly valued, not multiply valued.
  • Add new is_public method and PUBLIC_AUDIENCE constant.
  • Prefer "objectType": "featured" first in the image field when converting from AS1, last in the icon field. This matches the ActivityPub (Mastodon) convention of using icon for profile pictures and image for header images.
  • Propagate url values into new PropertyValue attachments on Person objects; these end up in Mastodon's "profile metadata" link fields.
  • to_as1: if an attachment's mediaType is image/..., override objectType and set it to image.
• Twitter
  • Trim alt text in line between post preview and creation
  • Correctly trim Twitter alt text
• Facebook
  • Scraping: extract post id and owner id from data-ft attribute and _ft_ query param more often instead of story_fbid, which is now an opaque token that changes regularly. (facebook-atom#27)
• Instagram
  • Add new Instagram.scraped_json_to_activities method.
• GitHub
  • create and preview: convert profile URLs to @-mentions, eg https://github.com/snarfed to @snarfed (bridgy#1090).
    • get_activities with activity_id now supports fetch_replies and fetch_likes.
• Reddit
  • Add cache support to get_activities.
• REST API
  • Add new /scraped endpoint that accepts POST requests with silo HTML as input. Currently only supports Instagram. Requires site=instagram, output=... (any supported output format), and HTML as either raw request body or MIME multipart encoded file in the input parameter.
• microformats2
  • Add new extra and body_class kwargs to activities_to_html.
  • When converting u-featured images to AS1, add new non-standard "objectType": "featured" field to distinguish them from u-photo.
  • Convert p-note to AS1 summary.
  • Bug fixes for converting image attachments to photo.
• Source.original_post_discovery: add new max_redirect_fetches keyword arg.

4.0 - 2022-03-23

Breaking changes:

• Drop Python 3.5 support. Python 3.6 is now the minimum required version.

Non-breaking changes:

• RSS:
  • Add support for RSS input via new rss.to_activities function.
• Add new include_shares kwarg to get_activities, implemented for Twitter and Mastodon. Defaults to True. If False, shares (retweets in Twitter, boosts in Mastodon) will be discarded and not returned. Also add a corresponding shares query param to the REST API.
• Instagram (scraping):
  • Handle media items with no user object, add new fetch for comments.
  • Add Instagram.merge_scraped_comments().
• ActivityStreams 2:
  • Handle error when type isn't a string.
• Reddit:
  • Implement get_activities() to fetch posts by the current user or a user specified with user_id.
• Facebook scraping:
  • Skip "Suggested for you" posts.
  • Add log_html kwarg to get_activities; defaults to False.
  • Miscellaneous bug fixes.
• JSONFeed:
  • Handle malformed items.author element.

3.2 - 2021-09-15

• Source.original_post_discovery: add new include_reserved_hosts kwarg, defaults to True.
• Instagram:
  • Update scraping to handle new feed_v2 JSON format.
• Facebook:
  • Scraping: handle pictures, videos, link attachments, and text links in timeline/news feed posts.
• Mastodon:
  • Bug fix for get_activities() with fetch_mentions=True: handle notifications with status: null. Maybe happens when a status is deleted?
  • create/preview_create: support bookmarks. (Nothing special happens with them; their content is posted as a normal toot.)
• microformats2:
  • Stop rendering image.displayName as visible text in HTML, since it's already in the <img>'s alt attribute.
  • Add bookmark-of support.
  • Add prefix_image_urls() function.
  • Handle null content in AS1/2 objects.
  • json_to_object bug fix for composite bookmark-of properties.
• Twitter:
  • create/preview: support large videos via async upload. We now pass media_category=tweet_video to the chunked upload INIT stage, and then make blocking STATUS calls until the video is finished processing. (bridgy#1043)
  • create/preview: allow bookmarks. (bridgy#1045)
  • create/preview: allow non-Twitter replies, ie activities that include inReplyTo URLs even if none of them point to a tweet. (bridgy#1063)
  • get_activities: support list ids as well as slugs.
  • Bug fixes for removing t.co links to quoted tweets.
  • Bug fix for multiple instances of the same link in tweet text.
  • get_activities(): raise ValueError on invalid user_id.
• REST API: ported web framework from webapp2 to Flask. No user-visible behavior change expected.

3.1 - 2021-04-03

• Add Python 3.8 support, drop 3.3 and 3.4. Python 3.5 is now the minimum required version.
• Add Pixelfed! Heavily based on Mastodon.
• Standardize Instagram's and Facebook's scraping into new common scraped_to_activities(), scraped_to_activity(), and merge_scraped_reactions() methods.
• Atom:
  • Add the summary element (#157).
• REST API:
  • Bug fix: URL-encode Unicode characters in Link HTTP headers (eg rel=self, rel=header).
• Facebook:
  • Scraping now uses mbasic.facebook.com instead of m.facebook.com.
• Flickr:
  • Add support for adding tags to existing photos (bridgy#857).
  • get_comment(): skip fetching comments from API if activity kwarg is provided and contains the requested comment.
• GitHub:
  • Handle HTTP 451 Unavailable for Legal Reasons responses (eg for DMCA takedowns) gracefully.
  • Add create/preview support for reactions on pull review request comments (ie URLs with #discussion_r... fragments).
• HTML/microformats2:
  • Add aria-hidden="true" to empty links (bridgy#947).
  • Bug fix: escape &, <, and > characters in bare mf2 content properties (aaronpk/XRay#102).
  • json_to_object(): convert nickname to username.
• JSON Feed:
  • Gracefully handle when content_html and content_text are incorrectly lists instead of strings.
• Instagram:
  • Include threaded (ie nested) comments in scraping (bridgy#958).
• Mastodon:
  • Bug fix for alt text with image attachments (bridgy#975).
  • Omit empty limit param for compatibility with Pleroma (bridgy#977).
• Meetup:
  • create(): handle API errors and return the error message in the CreationResult (bridgy#921).
• Twitter:
  • Bug fix: URL-encode list names in API calls.
  • Bug fix: propagate alt text into AS1 photo.displayName so that it gets all the way into microformats2 JSON and HTML (#183).
• Reddit:
  • Implement post_id().
  • Cache user data fetched from the API for 5m to avoid repeating user profile API requests (bridgy#1021). when fetching multiple comments or posts from the same author
  • Bug fix: use 'displayName' instead of 'name' in AS1 objects for submissions.
  • Bug fix: use tag URIs for activity ids.
• ActivityStreams 2:
  • to_as1(): for Create activities, include the activity actor's data in the object's author (snarfed/bridgy-fed#75).
  • to_as1(): convert preferredUsername to username.
  • from_as1(): convert username to preferredUsername.
  • from_as1(): bug fix, make context kwarg actually work.

3.0 - 2020-04-08

Breaking changes:

• Python 2 is no longer supported! Including the App Engine Standard Python 2 runtime. On the plus side, the Python 3 runtime is now supported! See this list of differences for more details.

Non-breaking changes:

• Migrate demo app and API to the App Engine Standard Python 3 runtime.
• Instagram:
  • Scraping: fetch 50 likes instead of 24. (snarfed/bridgy#898)
  • Scraping bug fix for get_actor() with user_id.
• Twitter:
  • Add image alt text support to get_activites() etc (#183).
• RSS:
  • Add itunes:image, itunes:author, and itunes:category.
  • Strip HTML from title element (#177). Background.
  • Always include author in items (#177).
  • Bug fix: extract feed image from hfeed correctly.
  • Bug fix: don't crash on article or mention tags in items with enclosures.
• Atom:
  • Bug fix: extract feed image from hfeed correctly.
• REST API:
  • Add HTTP HEAD support.
  • Add support for URL fragments with input=html. If a fragment is provided, only that specific element is extracted and converted. (#185)
• GitHub:
  • Publish: preserve <code> tags instead of converting them to `s so that GitHub renders HTML entities like > inside them instead of leaving them escaped. Background.
• JSON Feed:
  • Handle malformed attachments better.
• microformats2:
  • Don't crash on string context fields.
  • html_to_activities(): limit to h-entry, h-event, and h-cite items (#192).
• The cache kwarg to Source.original_post_discovery() now has no effect. webutil.util.follow_redirects() has its own built in caching now.
• Added Meetup.com support for publishing RSVPs.

2.2 - 2019-11-02

• Add Mastodon support!
• Add Python 3.7 support, and improve overall Python 3 compatibility.
• Update a number of dependencies.
• Switch from Python's built in json module to ujson to speed up JSON parsing and encoding.
• Add duration and size support to ActivityStreams 1 and 2, RSS, and microformats2 HTML and JSON. microformats2 support is still emerging for both. Both integer seconds and ISO 8601 string durations are supported for duration. Integer bytes is used for size everywhere. microformats2 HTML also includes human-readable strings, eg 5.1 MB. (#169)
• Twitter:
  • [preview]_create(): detect attempts to upload images over 5MB and return an error.
• Facebook:
  • Add get_activities(scrape=True) for scraping HTML from m.facebook.com. Requires c_user and xs cookies from a logged in session (snarfed/bridgy#886).
  • Upgrade Graph API version from 2.10 to 4.0.
• Atom:
  • Bug fix for de-duping images in attachments.
• RSS:
  • Wrap all <description> element contents in CDATA sections.
  • Render images in <description> with HTML <img> tags (#175).
  • from_activities() bug fix: don't crash when converting multiple attachments to enclosures in a single item. (RSS only supports one enclosure per item, so we now only include the first, and log a warning if the activity has more.)

2.1 - 2019-09-04

• Convert AS2 Mention tags to AS1 objectType mention (non-standard) and vice versa (snarfed/bridgy-fed#46).
• Twitter:
  • Bug fix for large block list fetches that get rate limited after a few successful requests.
  • Handle HTTP 403 + error code 200 when fetching retweets for a protected or otherwise unavailable tweet (bridgy#688).
  • Demote @-mentions from person-tags to mentions. Specifically, this means they'll no longer get rendered with u-category mf2.
• Instagram:
  • Disabled in the REST API entirely due to Instagram's aggressive rate limiting and blocking (bridgy#655).
  • Update scraping to handle replies in new edge_media_to_parent_comment field (#164).
  • Use cookie for all scraping HTTP requests, not just for likes.
• microformats2:
  • Revise whitespace handling; use white-space: pre CSS in HTML output.
• Facebook:
  • Bug fix: don't interpret photo.php as username in post URLs.
• Atom:
  • Switch from white-space: pre CSS back to converting newlines to <br>s because some feed readers (eg NewsBlur) follow it too strictly and don't even line wrap.
• RSS:
  • Default title to ellipsized content.

2.0 - 2019-03-01

Breaking change: drop Google+ since it shuts down in March. Notably, this removes the googleplus module.

1.15 - 2019-02-28

• Add RSS 2.0 output! (#124)
• All silos:
  • Switch users' primary URLs from web site to silo profile (#158).
• GitHub:
  • Don't enclose bare URLs in </> (snarfed/bridgy#850).
• Atom:
  • Bug fix for actors and attachments with multiple image URLs.
  • Bug fix for attachment author objects with no properties.
• Google+:
  • Drop from web UI and REST API since consumer Google+ is shutting down entirely (more).
  • Switch from deprecated global API endpoint to G+ endpoint. Background in snarfed/bridgy#846, Google blog post and docs.
• Instagram:
  • Fix individual photo/video link urls for multi-photo/video posts.
  • Handle user-provided alt text (#159).
• Twitter:
  • Update max video upload size from 5MB to 512MB (#162).
• /url: Return HTTP 400 when fetching the user's URL results in an infinite redirect.

1.14 - 2018-11-12

Add delete(). Currently includes Twitter and Flickr support.

• Instagram:
  • Make extra HTTP fetch (with cookie) to get individual likes (snarfed/bridgy#840).
  • Update scraping logic to handle feed HTML changes.
  • Link @-mentions in comments as well as photo/video captions.
• GitHub:
  • create/preview_create bug fixes for issues and comments on private repos.
  • Handle HTTP 410 Gone responses from REST API, eg when a repo has been deleted or issues for the repo disabled.
• Twitter:
  • Add delete() and preview_delete() for deleting tweets.
• Flickr:
  • Add delete() and preview_delete() for deleting photos.
• microformats2:
  • Add follow-of support.
  • Only use quotation-of property for quote tweets, not URLs. (#155)
  • If a tag has startIndex/length, it gets linkified in the content, so don't also emit an mf2 child or HTML h-cite for it. (#155
• Atom:
  • Encode &s in author URL and email address too. (Thanks sebsued!)
• AS2:
  • Add Follow support.

1.13 - 2018-08-08

• Twitter:
  • Support ISO 8601 formatted created_at timestamps, which the archive download uses, as well as RFC 2822 from the API.
  • create() and preview_create(): support RSVPs. Tweet them as normal tweets with the RSVP content. (snarfed/bridgy#818)
  • create() and preview_create(): support alt text for images, via AS1 displayName. (snarfed/bridgy#756).
• Instagram:
  • Add global rate limiting lock for scraping. If a scraping HTTP request gets a 429 or 503 response, we refuse to make more requests for 5m, and instead short circuit and return the same error. This can be overridden with a new ignore_rate_limit kwarg to get_activities().
• GitHub:
  • Add tag support to create/preview_create to add label(s) to existing issues (snarfed/bridgy#811).
  • Escape HTML characters (<, >, and &) in content in create() and preview_create() (snarfed/bridgy#810).
  • get_activities() and get_comment() now return ValueError instead of AssertionError on malformed activity_id and comment_id args, respectively.
  • get_activities() bug fix for issues/PRs with no body text.
  • Switch from GraphQL to REST API for creating comments and reactions, since GraphQL hits authorization errors on many org repos. (snarfed/bridgy#824)
  • Improve GraphQL support for comments and users.
• Atom:
  • Shorten and ellipsize feed title when necessary (#144).
• microformats2:
  • Upgrade mf2py to improve a few things like implied p-name detection and whitespace handling (#142, fixes #145, snarfed/bridgy#756, snarfed/bridgy#828).
  • Support alt attribute in <img> tags (snarfed/bridgy#756).

1.12 - 2018-03-24

• Add Python 3 support! Granary now requires either Python 2.7+ or Python 3.3+.
• Instagram:
  • Fix scraping profile pages.
• Twitter:
  • Update character counting to handle Twitter change that now auto-links all ccTLDs. Background.
• GitHub:
  • Bug fix for get_activities() with deleted issues and repos.
• microformats2:
  • object_to_json(): convert tags to simple strings in the category property, not full nested objects like h-cards (#141).
  • Special case GitHub issues that are in-reply-to a repo or its /issues URL to be objectType issue.
  • Render simple string categories in HTML output.

This release is intentionally small and limited in scope to contain any impact of the Python 3 migration. It should be a noop for existing Python 2 users, and we've tested thoroughly, but I'm sure there are still bugs. Please file issues if you notice anything broken!

1.11 - 2018-03-09

• Add GitHub!
  • get_activities() supports issues and pull requests, including comments and reactions. It's currently based on notifications, so it's best effort, not comprehensive, and only includes recently active issues/PRs.
  • create() and preview_create() support issues, comments, stars, and reactions.
• Twitter:
  • Prefer MP4 and other video/... content types to HLS (.m3u8) etc. Background.
  • Prefer HTTPS URLs for media images.
  • get_activities(): Support @-prefixed usernames in user_id.
• Facebook:
  • Support new recurring aka multi-instance events. create() and preview_create() now only support RSVPs to individual instances of multi-instance events, to match the Facebook API itself.
  • Try harder to find original (full) sized photo URLs, specifically _o.jpg files instead of _s.jpg.
  • create() bug fix for photo and image URLs with unicode characters.
  • Fixed bug where get_activities(user_id=...) included the authenticated user's own recent photos, albums, and news publishes.
• Instagram:
  • Extract more user (author) data from scraped profile pages.
  • Fix home page feed scraping.
• microformats2, Atom:
  • Add enclosures for image attachments.
  • Bug fixes for rendering image, video, and audio attachments inside shares and attachments. De-dupe images.
• microformats2:
  • Handle simple string-only author properties.
  • Add fetch_mf2 kwarg to json_to_object() for fetching additional pages over HTTP to determine authorship.
  • Generate explicit blank p-name in HTML to prevent old flawed implied p-name handling (#131).
  • Fix share verb handling in activity_to_json() and activities_to_html() (#134).
  • Remember which content contains HTML, preserve newlines in it, and don't translate those newlines to <br>s (#130).
• Atom:
  • Fix timezone bugs in updated and published.
• JSON Feed:
  • Omit title from items if it's the same as the content. (Often caused by microformats2's implied p-name logic.)

1.10 - 2017-12-10

• Moved web site and REST API to granary.io! granary-demo.appspot.com now 301 redirects.
• Twitter:
  • Update the publish character limit to 280. Background.
  • Fix a bug in preview_create that auto-linked @-mentions inside URLs, e.g. Medium posts.
  • Support videos and animated GIFs in get_activities() etc.
• Instagram:
  • Add cookie query param to REST API to allow scraping that logged in user's feed.
• HTML (including Atom content):
  • Render image, video, and audio attachments more often and consistently.
  • Include microformats2 u-photo, u-video, and u-audio classes more often and consistently.
• Atom:
  • Add atom_to_activities() for converting full feed documents.
  • Add to REST API and web UI.
  • Include source URL in rel=alternate link as well as actor/author URL (#151).
• JSON Feed:
  • Fix bug that omitted title in some cases (#122).

1.9 - 2017-10-24

• Add ActivityStreams 2.0! New as2 module includes to_as1() and from_as1() functions. Currently supported: articles, notes, replies, likes, reposts, events, RSVPs, tags, attachments.
• Atom:
  • Add new atom_to_activity() function for converting Atom to AS1.
  • Add email field to author, if provided.
• JSON Feed:
  • Raise ValueError on bad (non-dict) input.
• REST API:
  • Add as2 value for format and input. Revise existing ActivityStreams and microformats2 value names to as1, as1-xml, and mf2-json. Old values activitystreams, json, json-mf2, and xml are still accepted, but deprecated.

1.8 - 2017-08-29

• Add JSON Feed support to both library and REST API.
• Twitter:
  • Add get_blocklist().
  • Bug fix for creating replies, favorites, or retweets of video URLs, e.g. https://twitter.com/name/status/123/video/1 .
  • Bug fix for parsing favorites HTML to handle a small change on Twitter's side.
  • post_id() now validates ids more strictly before returning them.
• Facebook:
  • Improve heuristic for determining privacy of wall posts from other users.
  • Support GIFs in comments (attachment types animated_image_autoplay and animated_image_share).
  • Upgrade Graph API from v2.6 to v2.10.
• Instagram:
  • Update scraping to handle new home page (ie news feed) JSON schema, which changed sometime around 2017-02-27. (Profile pages and individual photo/video permalinks still haven't changed yet.)
• microformats2:
  • Add u-featured to ActivityStreams image.
  • Improve h-event support.
  • Minor whitespace change (added

    ) when rendering locations as HTML.

  • post_id() now validates ids more strictly before returning them.
  • Fix bugs in converting latitude and longitude between ActivityStreams and mf2.
• Google+:
  • Update HTML scraping to handle changed serialized JSON data format.
• Atom:
  • Add new activity_to_atom() function that renders a single top-level <entry> instead of <feed>.
  • Add new reader query param for toggling rendering decisions that are specific to feed readers. Right now, just affects location: it's rendered in the content when reader=true (the default), omitted when reader=false.
  • Include author name when rendering attached articles and notes (e.g. quote tweets).
  • Only include AS activity:object-type and activity:verb elements when they have values.
  • Render AS image and mf2 u-photo if they're not already in content.
  • Render thr:in-reply-to from object.inReplyTo as well as activity.context.inReplyTo.
• REST API:
  • Fix bugs in html => json-mf2 and html => html conversions.
• Upgrade brevity to 0.2.14 for a couple bug fixes.

1.7 - 2017-02-27

• microformats2:
  • Interpret h-cite and u-quotation-of (experimental) as attachments, e.g. for quote tweets.
  • Convert audio and video properties to AS attachments.
• Twitter:
  • Linkify @-mentions and hashtags in preview_create().
  • Support creating quote tweets from attachments with Twitter URLs.
  • When converting quote tweets to AS, strip quoted tweet URL from end of text.
  • Raise ValueError when get_activities() is passed group_id='@search' but not search_query.
• Instagram:
  • Improve HTML scraping error handling.
  • Support multi-photo/video posts.
• Facebook:
  • Disable creating "interested" RSVPs, since Facebook's API doesn't allow it.
• Atom:
  • Support media enclosures for audio and video attachments.
• Source.get_activities(): start raising ValueError on bad argument values, notably invalid Facebook and Twitter ids and Instagram search queries.
• Fix rendering and linkifying content with Unicode high code points (ie above the 16-bit Basic Multilingual Plane), including some emoji, on "narrow" builds of Python 2 with --enable-unicode=ucs2, which is the default on Mac OS X, Windows, and older *nix.

1.6 - 2016-11-26

• Twitter:
  • Handle new "extended" tweets with hidden reply-to @-mentions and trailing URLs for media, quote tweets, etc. Background: https://dev.twitter.com/overview/api/upcoming-changes-to-tweets
  • Bug fix: ensure like.author.displayName is a plain unicode string so that it can be pickled normally, e.g. by App Engine's memcache.
  • Bug fix: handle names with emoji correctly in favorites_html_to_likes().
  • Bug fix: handle search queries with unicode characters.
• Atom:
  • Render full original quoted tweet in retweets of quote tweets.
• microformats2 HTML:
  • Optionally follow and fetch rel="author" links.
  • Improve mapping between microformats2 and ActivityStreams 'photo' types. (mf2 'photo' type is a note or article with a photo, but AS 'photo' type is a photo. So, map mf2 photos to underlying type without photo.)
  • Support location properties beyond h-card, e.g. h-adr, h-geo, u-geo, and even when properties like latitude and longitude appear at the top level.
• Error handling: return HTTP 502 for non-JSON API responses, 504 for connection failures.

1.5 - 2016-08-25

• REST API:
  • Support tag URI for user id, app id, and activity id.
• Twitter:
  • Better error message when uploading a photo with an unsupported type.
  • Only include original quote tweets, not retweets of them.
  • Skip fetching retweets for protected accounts since the API call always 403s.
• Flickr:
  • Better username detection. Flickr's API is very inconsistent about username vs real name vs path alias. This specifically detects when a user name is probably actually a real name because it has a space.
  • Uploading: detect and handle App Engine's 10MB HTTP request limit.
  • Bug fix in create: handle unicode characters in photo/video description, hashtags, and comment text.
• Atom:
  • Bug fix: escape &s in attachments' text (e.g. quote tweets).
  • Bug fix: handle multiply valued 'object' fields in ActivityStreams 1 activities.
• GitHub:
  • Switch creating comments and reactions from GraphQL to REST API (bridgy#824.

1.4.1 - 2016-06-27

• Bump oauth-dropins requirement to 1.4.

1.4.0 - 2016-06-27

• REST API:
  • Cache silo requests for 5m by default, 60m for Instagram because they aggressively blocking scraping. You can skip the cache with the new cache=false query param.
• Facebook:
  • Upgrade from API v2.2 to v2.6. https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/changelog
  • Add reaction support.
  • De-dupe event RSVPs by user.
• Twitter:
  • Switch create() to use brevity for counting characters. https://github.com/kylewm/brevity
  • Fix bug in create() that occasionally incorrectly escaped ., +, and - characters.
  • Fix text rendering bug when there are multipl photos/videos.
  • When replying to yourself, don't add a self @-mention.
• Instagram:
  • Fix bugs in scraping.
• Upgrade to requests 2.10.0 and requests-toolbelt 0.60, which support App Engine.

1.3.1 - 2016-04-07

• Update oauth-dropins dependency to >=1.3.

1.3.0 - 2016-04-06

• Support posting videos! Currently in Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter.
• Instagram:
  • Add support for scraping, since they're locking down their API and requiring manual approval.
  • Linkify @-mentions in photo captions.
• Facebook:
  • Fetch Open Graph stories aka news.publish actions.
  • Many bug fixes for photo posts: better privacy detection, fix bug that attached comments to wrong posts.
• Twitter:
  • Handle all photos/videos attached to a tweet, not just the first.
  • Stop fetching replies to @-mentions.
• Atom:
  • Render attachments.
  • Add xml:base.
• microformats2:
  • Load and convert h-card.
  • Implement full post type discovery algorithm, using mf2util. https://indiewebcamp.com/post-type-discovery
  • Drop support for h-as-* classes, both incoming and outgoing. They're deprecated in favor of post type discovery.
  • Drop old deprecated u-like and u-repost properties.
• Misc bug fixes.
• Set up Coveralls.

1.2.0 - 2016-01-11

• Improve original post discovery algorithm. (bridgy #51)
• Flickr tweaks. (bridgy #466)
• Add mf2, activitystreams, atom, and search to interactive UI. (#31, #29)
• Improved post type discovery (using mf2util).
• Extract user web site links from all fields in profile (e.g. description/bio).
• Add fabricated fragments to comment/like permalinks (e.g. #liked-by-user123) so that object urls are always unique (multiple silos).
• Improve formatting/whitespace support in create/preview (multiple silos).
• Google+:
  • Add search.
• Facebook:
  • Fetch more things in get_activities: photos, events, RSVPs.
  • Support person tags in create/preview.
  • Prevent facebook from automatically consolidating photo posts by uploading photos to "Timeline Photos" album.
  • Include title in create/preview.
  • Improve object id parsing/resolving.
  • Improve tag handling.
  • Bug fix for fetching nested comments.
  • Misc improvements, API error/flakiness handling.
• Flickr:
  • Create/preview support for photos, comments, favorites, tags, person tags, location.
• Twitter:
  • Create/preview support for location, multiple photos.
  • Fetch quote tweets.
  • Fetching user mentions improvements, bug fixes.
  • Fix embeds.
  • Misc AS conversion improvements.
• microformats2:
  • Improve like and repost rendering.
• Misc bug fixes.
• Set up CircleCI.

1.1.0 - 2015-09-06

• Add Flickr.
• Facebook:
  • Fetch multiple id formats, e.g. with and without USERID_ prefix.
  • Support threaded comments.
  • Switch from /posts API endpoint to /feed.
• Google+:
  • Support converting plus.google.com HTML to ActivityStreams.
• Instagram:
  • Support location.
• Improve original post discovery algorithm.
• New logo.

1.0.1 - 2015-07-11

• Bug fix for atom template rendering.
• Facebook, Instagram: support access_token parameter.

1.0 - 2015-07-10

• Initial PyPi release.