Fedify

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Testing ​

Testing a federated server app is a bit tricky because it requires a federated environment. This document explains how to easily test your federated server app with the help of several tools.

Exposing a local server to the public ​

To test your federated server app, you need to expose your local server to the public internet with a domain name and TLS certificate. There are several tools that help you do that:

NOTE

These tools are not for production use; they are for testing only. In production, you should expose your server with a proper domain and TLS certificate.

TIP

These tools behave like a reverse proxy, so basically the federation server cannot recognize if it is behind a reverse proxy, and if the reverse proxy is in HTTPS. So the federation server will generate HTTP URLs in the ActivityPub messages, which cause interoperability issues.[1] In this case, you can use the treatHttps option in the new Federation() constructor to force the federation server to generate HTTPS URLs:

typescript
import { Federation } from "@fedify/fedify";

const federation = new Federation({
  // ...
  treatHttps: true,   
});

Inspecting ActivityPub messages ​

ActivityPub.Academy ​

ActivityPub.Academy is a special Mastodon instance that is designed for debugging and testing ActivityPub peers. You can create an account on it and use it for testing your federated server app. Its best feature is that it provides a web interface for debugging ActivityPub messages. Any sent and received activities are displayed on the web interface in real-time.

NOTE

Any accounts on ActivityPub.Academy are volatile; they are deleted after a certain period of inactivity.

fedify inbox command ​

Fedify provides a CLI toolchain for testing and debugging. The fedify inbox command is a simple tool for spinning up an ephemeral inbox server that receives and displays incoming ActivityPub messages.

  1. According to the Object Identifiers section in the ActivityPub specification, the public dereferenceable URIs should use HTTPS URIs. ↩︎