Activities

The activities backend provides support for the Activity Streams (and very slightly ActivityPub) standards. Message are stored locally in the database and are retrievable from an inbox. References to notions like actors and inboxes refer to the ideas in that standard.

Setting up the activities is fairly involved, and also entirely optional unless you actually want to use the activity backend. As a result, it’s got its own documentation. Note that this backend is somewhat experimental. Don’t use it in production unless you’ve tested it really well and know what you’re doing.

Settings

Because we need to generate full uri/iris (including the domain) and we need to be able to do it without an HTTP request, we need to have a way of finding out your domain & scheme. If you’re already using django.contrib.sites and you have it set up with a SITE_ID in your settings, that’ll work. Otherwise a simpler solution is to just set these two settings:

SITE_DOMAIN	Your site’s domain name
SITE_SSL	True if you use HTTPS, False otherwise

Caution

SITE_SSL should nearly always be True (the default) unless you’re in development testing on localhost.

Also, because this backend isn’t enabled by default, you’ll need to alter DJANGO_VOX_BACKENDS and add 'django_vox.backends.activity.Backend',. You can see an example on the Backends page.

Registering actors

Like we had to register channels before, now we have to register actors too. It’s mostly accurate to say that actors should be any users that you want to be able send/receive activities.

Actors all have endpoints, and inboxes (and some unimplemented things). When you add an actor you specify the route for his/her endpoint using a regex, much like you would make a normal Django 1 url route. The parameters in the regex should correspond to the identifying field in the user. Here’s an example:

actors[User].set_regex(r'^users/(?P<username>[0-9]+)/$')

Additionally, you’ll also need to return the activity contact from the get_contacts_for_notification method for the actors. If you want to send them all the possible notification, then add the following code:

def get_contacts_for_notification(self, _notification):
    yield Contact(self.name, 'activity', self.get_object_address())

Setting up models

Just like we had to add a bunch of properties to the models for the basic features in django_vox, there’s a few more to add to get good results for the activity stream. These aren’t strictly necessary, but your results will be pretty plain without them. Code samples of all of these are available in the test site the comes with django_vox.

First, the notification parameters take a new parameter activity_type. It can be set to an aspy.Activity subclass. If it’s not set, django_vox with either match the notification name to an activity type, or use the default ‘Create’ type.

Note

This code makes use of the aspy library. It’s a dependency, so you should get it automatically, just import aspy.

Second, the object of your activity entries defaults to the plain activity streams “Object” with an id (based on get_absolute_url() and a name (based on __str__()). This is pretty bare-bones to say the least. You can specify something more colorful by implementing the __activity__() method and returning another subclass of aspy.Object with perhaps a few properties.

Finally, there’s a few rare cases where the same model might need to give you different objects for different kinds of notifications. If you need to do this, you can override VoxModel.get_activity_object().

Note

If your model is registered with django_vox.registry.objects, it’s recommended to use VoxModel.get_object_address() to get the object’s ID, otherwise you can use django_vox.base.full_iri(self.get_absolute_url()).

Accessing the Inboxes

At this point, you should be able to make up activity notifications, issue them, and then retrieve them using django_vox.models.InboxItem. However, if you want to use our hackish ActivityPub half-implementation, there’s one/two more steps. First we have to enable the inbox middleware. Add this to your settings.py:

MIDDLEWARE = [
    ...
    'django_vox.middleware.activity_inbox_middleware',
]

There‘s still a few things that remain to be documented, like reading inbox items, and adding the ability to perform actions on data in your models by posting to the inbox.