cattle_grid 0.5.18

Middleware for the Fediverse

cattle_grid

cattle_grid handles a few common tasks that plague Fediverse applications:

• Maintaining an actor document and associated endpoints like inbox
• Verifying HTTP signatures
• Determine if somebody is authorized to view something or not
• Manage follower collections

Furthermore with its muck_out extension it handles parsing ActivityPub objects.

cattle_grid relies on faststream and then RabbitMQ for message processing. If you want to use cattle_grid, you will be faced with using message queues.

cattle_grid has an internal account system.

Related links

Applications using cattle_grid

• comments allows one to add comments to a static site
• fedi-herds allows list management
• roboherd allows one to build automatic posting bots (these have no frontend)

Related projects / utilities

• almabtrieb implements one of the Client protocols used by cattle_grid
• console provides a light weight frontend.

Development

Testing

You can run the pytest tests via

uv run pytest

or in watch mode

uv run ptw .

Running behave tests

Build the container via

./update_docker.sh

This script uses the requirements from pyproject.toml via uv export to install python dependencies in the container. This means this script needs to be rerun, if you make changes to the dependencies. Startup the docker environment via

docker compose up

Open a runner container

docker compose run --rm --name runner cattle_grid_app /bin/sh

Inside this container, you now run

fediverse-features
behave

The first step downloads some features from fediverse-features and the second step runs the test suite.

Building end 2 end reports (as done by CI)

The process to build the end to end reports is described here. The reports should be published to this repository and then made available here.

Running as stand alone

Create a requirements.txt file and start a virgin docker container

uv export --no-editable --no-emit-project --no-hashes --no-dev > requirements.txt
docker run --rm -ti -p 8000:8000\
    -v ./cattle_grid:/app/cattle_grid\
    -v ./requirements.txt:/app/requirements.txt \
    --workdir /app\
    helgekr/bovine:python3.13 /bin/sh

Once inside the docker container install dependencies

pip intall -r requirements.txt

and run cattle_grid via

uvicorn cattle_grid:create_app --factory --host 0.0.0.0

This currently fails.