Minisky

Minisky is a minimal client of the Bluesky (ATProto) API. It provides a simple API client class that you can use to log in to the Bluesky API and make any GET and POST requests there. It's meant to be an easy way to start playing and experimenting with the AT Protocol API.

Installation

To use Minisky, you need a reasonably new version of Ruby (2.6+). Such version should be preinstalled on macOS Big Sur and above and some Linux systems. Otherwise, you can install one using tools such as RVM, asdf, ruby-install or ruby-build, or rpm or apt-get on Linux.

To install the Minisky gem, run the command:

[sudo] gem install minisky

Or alternatively, add it to the Gemfile file for Bundler:

gem 'minisky', '~> 0.3'

Usage

All calls to the XRPC API are made through an instance of the Minisky class. There are two ways to use the library: with or without authentication.

Unauthenticated access

You can access parts of the API anonymously without any authentication. This currently includes: read-only com.atproto.* routes on the PDS (user's data server) and most read-only app.bsky.* routes on the AppView server.

This allows you to do things like:

  • look up specific records or lists of all records of a given type in any account (in their raw form)
  • look up profile information about any account
  • load complete threads or users' profile feeds from the AppView

To use Minisky this way, create a Minisky instance passing the API hostname string (at the moment there is only one server at bsky.social, but there will be more once federation support goes live) and nil as the configuration in the arguments:

require 'minisky'

bsky = Minisky.new('bsky.social', nil)

Authenticated access

To use the complete API including posting or reading your home feed, you need to log in using your account info and get an access token which will be added as an authentication header to all requests.

First, you need to create a .yml config file with the authentication data, e.g. bluesky.yml. It should look like this:

id: my.bsky.username
pass: very-secret-password

The id can be either your handle, or your DID, or the email you've used to sign up. It's recommended that you use the "app password" that you can create in the settings instead of your main account password.

After you log in, this file will also be used to store your access & request tokens and DID. The data in the config file can be accessed through a user wrapper property that exposes them as methods, e.g. the password is available as user.pass and the DID as user.did.

Next, create the Minisky client instance, passing the server name and the config file name:

require 'minisky'

bsky = Minisky.new('bsky.social', 'bluesky.yml')

Minisky automatically manages your access and refresh tokens - it will first log you in using the login & password, and then use the refresh token to update the access token before the request when it expires.

Making requests

With a Minisky client instance, you can make requests to the Bluesky API using get_request and post_request:

json = bsky.get_request('com.atproto.repo.listRecords', {
  repo: bsky.user.did,
  collection: 'app.bsky.feed.like'
})

json['records'].each do |r|
  puts r['value']['subject']['uri']
end

bsky.post_request('com.atproto.repo.createRecord', {
  repo: bsky.user.did,
  collection: 'app.bsky.feed.post',
  record: {
    text: "Hello world!",
    createdAt: Time.now.iso8601,
    langs: ["en"]
  }
})

In authenticated mode, the requests use the saved access token for auth headers automatically. You can also pass auth: false or auth: nil to not send any authentication headers for a given request, or auth: sometoken to use a specific other token. In unauthenticated mode, sending of auth headers is disabled.

The third useful method you can use is #fetch_all, which loads multiple paginated responses and collects all returned items on a single list (you need to pass the name of the field that contains the items in the response). Optionally, you can also specify a limit of pages to load as max_pages: n, or a break condition break_when to stop fetching when any item matches it. You can use it to e.g. to fetch all of your posts from the last 30 days, but not earlier:

time_limit = Time.now - 86400 * 30

posts = bsky.fetch_all('com.atproto.repo.listRecords',
  { repo: bsky.user.did, collection: 'app.bsky.feed.post' },
  field: 'records',
  max_pages: 10,
  break_when: ->(x) { Time.parse(x['value']['createdAt']) < time_limit })

There is also a progress option you can use to print some kind of character for every page load. E.g. pass progress: '.' to print dots as the pages are loading:

likes = bsky.fetch_all('com.atproto.repo.listRecords',
  { repo: bsky.user.did, collection: 'app.bsky.feed.like' },
  field: 'records',
  progress: '.')

This will output a line like this:

.................

You can find more examples in the example directory.

Customization

The Minisky client currently supports such configuration options:

  • default_progress - a progress character to automatically use for #fetch_all calls (default: nil)
  • send_auth_headers - whether auth headers should be added by default (default: true in authenticated mode)
  • auto_manage_tokens - whether access tokens should be generated and refreshed automatically when needed (default: true in authenticated mode)

In authenticated mode, you can disable the send_auth_headers option and then explicitly add auth: true to specific requests to include a header there.

You can also disable the auto_manage_tokens option - in this case you will need to call the #check_access method before a request to refresh a token if needed, or alternatively, call either #login or #perform_token_refresh.

Using your own class

Instead of using the Minisky class, you can also make your own class that includes the Minisky::Requests module and provides a different way to load & save the config, e.g. from a JSON file:

class BlueskyClient
  include Minisky::Requests

  attr_reader :config

  def initialize(config_file)
    @config_file = config_file
    @config = JSON.parse(File.read(@config_file))
  end

  def host
    'bsky.social'
  end

  def save_config
    File.write(@config_file, JSON.pretty_generate(@config))
  end
end

It can then be used just like the Minisky class:

bsky = BlueskyClient.new('config/access.json')
bsky.get_request(...)

The class needs to provide:

  • a host method or property that returns the hostname of the server
  • a config property which returns a hash or a hash-like object with the configuration and user data - it needs to support reading and writing arbitrary key-value pairs with string keys
  • a save_config method which persists the config object to the chosen storage

Credits

Copyright © 2023 Kuba Suder (@mackuba.eu).

The code is available under the terms of the zlib license (permissive, similar to MIT).

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome 😎