Fedibot Guide

Get your api token right from the commandline without other software

Prerequisites

• A commandline
• curl
• A text editor
• This repo saved locally (git clone https://github.com/taizweb/fedibot-guide.git or just download the zip)

Create Your Account

Go on whichever instance you plan to host the bot and make it an account. This will likely require an email.

Getting your client ID/Secret

• Go to the directory with this README inside it and edit api1
• Change the line with "client_name" to whatever you intend to name your bot.
• Change INSTANCE.HERE to whatever instance you put the account on. Keep the rest of the line the same
• Save the file
• Now, from your commandline, run ./api1
• You will get some text back from the instance as a response. Copy the parts after client_id and client_secret to a file. You should probably label these

Getting the access token

• Edit api2
• Change client_id and client_secret with the info you got from the last step
• Change INSTANCE.HERE to whatever instance you put the account on. Keep the rest of the line the same
• Save the file
• Now, from your commandline, run ./api2
• Once again you'll get some text back. This time you'll just want the access_token. Copy this somewhere

Confirming

• Edit api3
• On the second line, after the word "Bearer", paste your access token from the last step. There should be a space between Bearer and your token
• Change INSTANCE.HERE to whatever instance you put the account on. Keep the rest of the line the same
• Save the file
• Now, from your commandline, run ./api3
• If all goes well, a file named test will be created and contain info about your bot

Getting Auth Code

• Open a browser and visit https://INSTANCE.NAME/oauth/authorize?client_id=CLIENT_ID&scope=read+write+follow+push&redirect_uri=urn:ietf:wg:oauth:2.0:oob&response_type=code
• BEFORE you actually visit, edit INSTANCE.NAME to your instance's domain, and change the CLIENT_ID to whatever your client id was from a previous step
• On the page, type in your username/password for the account
• If all went well, you should be at a page saying "Successfully authorized" and be given a token code. Save this. NOTE: On some displays, the token code won't be entirely visible in the box. To ensure you copied the entire thing, double click the code to highlight it, then copy it

Getting the Token

• Edit api4
• Replace client_id, client_secret and code (the authcode from last step) with your information
• Change INSTANCE.HERE to whatever instance you put the account on. Keep the rest of the line the same
• Save the file
• Now, from your commandline, run ./api4
• Finally, copy the access_token you get as a response and save it

Making a test post

This step is entirely optional, but if you want to be sure the token is working:

• Edit post
• On the second line, after "Bearer" (mind the space), past your token from the last step in
• Replace INSTANCE.NAME with your instance
• Save the file
• Now, from your commandline, run ./post
• You should get some data back, but it's safe to ignore that. Instead, go to your bot account in your browser and see if the message was posted

Where to go from here

Now that you have the token, you can do anything the api allows. I recommend checking out the Mastodon docs for things to use on the api. Additionally there's multiple api wrappers that you can now make full use of, such as https://github.com/halcy/Mastodon.py.