posthole

[!WARNING] Pre-release / alpha. APIs and UI may break without notice. Not yet recommended for any production use.

Local mock server for social media platform APIs - auth, publishing, the lot.

posthole is a developer tool that stands in for real social media platform APIs so you can build and test integrations end-to-end on your laptop. Run it next to your app, point your code at 127.0.0.1:5176 instead of the real provider, and an inbox-style UI shows every post you've published alongside the complete HTTP transcript of each call. Instagram is the first platform supported; TikTok, Facebook, and others are on the roadmap.

It mocks the parts of these APIs you actually need while developing:

• OAuth flows — authorize dialogs, token exchange, and token refresh.
• Content publishing — images, videos, reels, stories, and carousels (including mixed-media), modeled on the real multi-step container → poll → publish lifecycle.
• Accounts and permissions — switch between seeded test accounts and simulate revoked permissions.
• Per-endpoint behavior toggles — flip any endpoint into a failure mode at runtime: rate-limited, validation error, media URL unreachable, reel duration too long, expired token, async-finished-with-error, slow response.
• Scenarios — named bundles of behaviors (Validation, Quota, Auth, Async, Latency) so a single switch flips a whole class of failures on at once and you can watch how your code copes.

On the roadmap: replay (re-drive a captured request chain under a different scenario without re-running your app), inject (seed posts manually to reproduce specific UI states), more platforms (TikTok, Facebook, then YouTube and Threads), and richer device-preview frames.

Quick start

Docker (recommended):

docker run --rm -p 5176:5176 ghcr.io/socialpyre/posthole:latest
# → http://127.0.0.1:5176

As a uv tool (once published to PyPI):

uvx posthole
# → http://127.0.0.1:5176

Getting started

Prerequisites

• Python 3.12+
• uv ≥ 0.11 — curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh
• Node 22 + pnpm 11 — nvm use (reads .nvmrc) then corepack enable
• Docker (optional, only if you want to run the containerized image or test it locally)

Clone, install, run

git clone https://github.com/socialpyre/posthole
cd posthole
make install            # uv sync + pnpm install
make dev                # server + asset watchers + browser auto-reload

Then open http://127.0.0.1:5176.

Configurable knobs live in .env.schema; copy to .env.local to override locally. See CONTRIBUTING.md for the workflow.

Common make targets

Live reload

make dev runs the processes declared in Procfile.dev under honcho, so a single Ctrl-C tears them all down:

• fastapi dev restarts the server on .py / .toml edits via watchfiles.
• esbuild --watch rebuilds src/posthole/static/app.js on .ts edits.
• tailwindcss --watch rebuilds src/posthole/static/app.css on template / CSS edits.
• arel is mounted on /hot-reload (gated by POSTHOLE_DEV_RELOAD=1) and reloads the browser when watched files change.

See CONTRIBUTING.md for the full development workflow, commit conventions, and release process.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.