🌙 Lunette 🪟

A lunette is a moon-shaped window.

Lunette is a single-user ActivityPub instance written in Lua - a tiny moon-shaped window on the Fediverse.

More specifically it is my instance, available on the web and at @[email protected] on the Fediverse. It is very adaptable to become someone else's blog, but you'll have to fork it and change some of the source code! This is because Lunette uses a lot of magical Lua DSL to build and output HTML, and that lives in the source code.

How to run Lunette

There are two ways to run Lunette: in Docker (which is easiest - you don't need to install Lua at all), or natively.

Either way, start by creating a .env file in the Lunette directory. This is read by Docker Compose and native Lua. You can add more to this file (see below) but this is the bare minimum:

AP_DOMAIN=localhost:8181
AP_SCHEME=http
AP_USERNAME=blog
AP_NAME=My Lunette Blog

Next, generate your ActivityPub keypair. Lunette signs everything it sends to other Fediverse servers with this key, and refuses to start without it. Never commit it to Git!

mkdir -p keys
openssl genrsa -out keys/private_key.pem 2048
openssl rsa -in keys/private_key.pem -pubout -out keys/public_key.pem

openssl is preinstalled on macOS and most Linux distributions.

Docker

You need Docker (or OrbStack on macOS). Then, from the Lunette directory:

docker compose up --build

Once it starts up, Lunette should be running at http://localhost:8181.

Native Lua on macOS

Lunette needs Lua 5.4, not the current default 5.5 (some of its dependencies don't support 5.5 yet).

# Lua 5.4, the LuaRocks package manager, and C libraries we build against
brew install [email protected] luarocks sqlite cmark openssl@3

# chroma does build-time syntax highlighting (optional)
brew install chroma

# Make `lua` mean 5.4, and point LuaRocks at it permanently
brew link [email protected]
luarocks config lua_version 5.4
luarocks config variables.LUA_DIR "$(brew --prefix [email protected])"

# Install Lunette's Lua dependencies
luarocks install http
luarocks install cmark
luarocks install luafilesystem
luarocks install lsqlite3 SQLITE_DIR="$(brew --prefix sqlite)"

Then run the server. The eval puts the LuaRocks tree on Lua's module path (add it to your ~/.zshrc/~/.bashrc to make it permanent).

eval "$(luarocks path)"
lua src/main.lua

Visit http://localhost:8181.

Native Lua on Debian/Ubuntu

This basically mirrors what the Dockerfile does:

sudo apt install lua5.4 liblua5.4-dev luarocks build-essential \
    libssl-dev libsqlite3-dev libcmark-dev m4 curl

# chroma has no Debian package so grab the release binary
ARCH=$(dpkg --print-architecture)
curl -sfL "https://github.com/alecthomas/chroma/releases/download/v2.27.0/chroma-2.27.0-linux-${ARCH}.tar.gz" \
    | sudo tar xz -C /usr/local/bin chroma

# The Lua dependencies, into your user tree (no sudo required)
luarocks --local --lua-version=5.4 install http
luarocks --local --lua-version=5.4 install cmark
luarocks --local --lua-version=5.4 install luafilesystem
luarocks --local --lua-version=5.4 install lsqlite3

Then:

eval "$(luarocks --lua-version=5.4 path)"
lua5.4 src/main.lua

Configuration

Variable	Default	Description
AP_DOMAIN	localhost:8181	Your public domain
AP_SCHEME	https	http for local development
AP_PORT	8181	Port the server listens on
AP_USERNAME	lunette	The account name: @lunette@yourdomain
AP_NAME	Lunette	Display name shown on Fediverse profiles
AP_SUMMARY	none	Profile bio shown on Fediverse profiles (some HTML allowed)
AP_KEYS_DIR	keys	Where the RSA keypair lives
DATABASE_FILE	data/database.sqlite3	The SQLite database