# gotosocial

A library for building GoToSocial bots

## client

This is a variant on my Mastodon bot code and hasn't been properly tested yet: I'll document it when I've done that.

## register

A utility for making it easier to register an app and get an access token for
a GoToSocial account - it's a Python script which automates as much of [the client API instructions](https://docs.gotosocial.org/en/latest/api/authentication/) as possible. There's still some manual stuff required for authenticating.

This project is maintained with [uv](https://docs.astral.sh/uv/): install it, check out this repo and then you can run the script with the uv commands below and it should take care of dependencies.

To register an app, you first need to give it an identity on the server - in the examples I've called the server `https://your.server/` and the app `mybot`

    uv run register -u https://your.server/ -n mybot

This will create an app on the server and write out the client id and secret to a file in the current directory called `mybot_app.json`. It will also write a URL to the command line for the next step

The second step is to visit that URL in an incognito browser window. You'll be prompted to authenticate - use the email address and password for the GoToSocial account which you want to post to via the app.

Once you authenticate, you should be taken to a page which has a message like:

    Hi account!
	
	Here's your out-of-band token with scope "write", use it wisely:
	
	ABIGLONGSTRINGOFLETTERSANDNUMBERS

Copy the out-of-band token and do the third step straight away, as the token will expire.

The third step exchanges the above token for a permanent access token, by running the script again in the same directory, passing the OOB token with the -t flag:

    uv run register -u https://your.server/ -n mybot -t ABIGLONGSTRINGOFLETTERSANDNUMBERS

If this is successful, your access token - another, different string of letters and numbers - will be printed to the command prompt. The access token is also written out as a json file with the name `mybot_at.json`.

You should now be able to use the access token to post to your GoToSocial account.