Using dialects to fetch Peertube Outbox activities

For some usages, you may use an instance without having to configure many items.

For instance, if you want to fetch some public activities, you don’t need to have a fully-configured server instance. Indeed, you don’t need any configuration at all.

Fetch an Outbox

use ActivityPhp\Server;

// Create a server instance
$server = new Server();

$handle = 'nickname@example.org';

// Get an actor's outbox as an OrderedCollection
$outbox = $server->outbox($handle);

// Prepare a stack
$pages = [];

// Browse first page
$page = $outbox->getPage($outbox->get()->first);

// Browse all pages and get public actvities
$pages[] = $page;
while ($page->next !== null) {
    $page = $outbox->getPage($page->next);
    $pages[] = $page;
}

And that’s it, you have an array containing all pages.

Therefore, if you test this implementation on a real world ActivityPub-powered application like Peertube, you would have something like:

Exception: Property "uuid" is not defined. Type="Video", Class="\ActivityPhp\Type\Extended\Object\Video"

Indeed, Peertube (and others like Mastodon) extends the ActivityPub object model to fit their needs.

So, in order to fetch Peertube’s activities, we need to extend our base models with Peertube dialect.

Define Peertube’s dialect

We will only partially implement peertube’s model.

After a step-by-step exceptions analysis, we’ve collected all attributes that are specific.

use ActivityPhp\Server;

/* ------------------------------------------------------------------
 | We'll use the following definitions to fit PeerTube's dialect
   ------------------------------------------------------------------ */

$peertube = [
    'Group'  => ['support'],
    'Video'  => [
        'uuid', 'category', 'language', 'views', 'sensitive', 'waitTranscoding',
        'state', 'commentsEnabled', 'support', 'subtitleLanguage', 'likes',
        'dislikes', 'shares', 'comments', 'licence'
    ],
    'Image'   => ['width', 'height'],
    'Link'    => ['fps', 'mimeType', 'size' ],
    'Hashtag' => ['type'],
    'Person|Group' => ['uuid', 'publicKey'],
];

After that, we set these definitions as peertube’s dialect:

// Create a server instance with a custom dialect
$server = new Server([
    'dialects' => [
        'peertube' => $peertube,
    ]
]);

And now we can work with Peertube’s objects!

Fetch Peertube Outbox activities

Below, a complete script to work with Peertube’s objects. It browses all outbox pages, collect all activities and display a list of activities and their videos names.

use ActivityPhp\Server;

/* ------------------------------------------------------------------
 | We'll use the following definitions to fit PeerTube's dialect
   ------------------------------------------------------------------ */
$peertube = [
    'Group'  => ['support'],
    'Video'  => [
        'uuid', 'category', 'language', 'views', 'sensitive', 'waitTranscoding',
        'state', 'commentsEnabled', 'support', 'subtitleLanguage', 'likes',
        'dislikes', 'shares', 'comments', 'licence'
    ],
    'Image'   => ['width', 'height'],
    'Link'    => ['fps', 'mimeType', 'size' ],
    'Hashtag' => ['type'],
    'Person|Group' => ['uuid', 'publicKey'],
];


/* ------------------------------------------------------------------
 | Now we can use an instance with a PeerTube flavor
   ------------------------------------------------------------------ */

// Create a server instance with a custom dialect
$server = new Server([
    'dialects' => [
        'peertube' => $peertube,
    ]
]);

$handle = 'nickname@example.org';

// Get an actor's outbox as an OrderedCollection
$outbox = $server->outbox($handle);

// Prepare a stack
$pages = [];

// Browse first page
$page = $outbox->getPage($outbox->get()->first);

// Browse all pages and get public actvities
$pages[] = $page;
while ($page->next !== null) {
    $page = $outbox->getPage($page->next);
    $pages[] = $page;
}

// Now we can work with pages
foreach ($pages as $page) {
    foreach ($page->orderedItems as $item) {
        echo sprintf(
            "Type=%s, Name=%s\n",
            $item->type,            // Activity type
            $item->object->name     // Video name
        );
    }
}

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