aether-purrsist

This is a Python tool designed to archive the content of Aether communities (boards) in IPFS. Aether is a peer-to-peer forums application. The content in Aether is ephemeral (6 months by default).

It does not connect to the Aether network, but rather uses the Aether SQLite database. It produces a website that can be pinned to a remote IPFS pinning service, as well as an Atom feed of all the Aether threads.

See a demo here (Atom feed) (sync date: 2023-09-16).

Installation

pip install .

Usage

Copy the config.yaml file from the examples directory and edit it if necessary. Then run it with the config path (otherwise it will use the file named config.yaml in the current directory):

aether-purrsist -c config.yaml

Use -v to increase verbosity:

aether-purrsist -vv

The website's CID will be echoed after it's finished.

Configuration

The ipfs.maddr setting should be the multiaddr of your kubo's node API endpoint.

The ipfs.ipns_key setting controls the name of the IPNS key to which the website will be published. If you change the IPNS key name, you will lose any Aether threads that had already been previously archived by aether-purrsist, therefore don't edit this setting unless it's the first time you run it.

To enable remote pinning, set enabled to True in the ipfs.pinremote section of the YAML config file. The service setting should match the name of the remote service as it's configured on your IPFS node. The pin_name setting is passed to the remote pinning service as the IPFS pin name for the archive. Before pinning to the remote service, any previous archive with this pin_name will be deleted (unpinned).

Boards sync config

Each Aether board that you want to archive should be listed in the boards section.

boards:
  AskAether:
    threads_ignore_byname:
      - 'dead'
  music:
    fingerprint: 6b38e6d4ccd61cc8cbdb11465e9d45abf0db4cd502b7b1b987fe7d1e624772f9

Sync options:

• max_threads: Maximum number of threads to archive (integer, default is 0, unlimited)
• threads_ignore_byname: a list of regular expressions that will be matched against the Name of each thread of this sub. If one of the regexps matches, this thread won't be archived
• fingerprint: Specify the exact fingerprint of the sub. The reason for this option is that board names in Aether are not unique (only fingerprints are). If you know the board's fingerprint (can be found in the sub's Info in the UI), you can set it here.