Interpersonal

Connecting static sites and the Indie Web

There is a standard called IndieAuth, which allows logging on to websites using your own website. It’s based on OAuth 2.0, and uses your own URL as canonical identity, replacing the username.

Interpersonal is an IndieAuth endpoint for my static site. Perhaps it’ll be useful to others as well.

Goals

My main goal was to support IndieAuth but keep my statically-generated blog hosted where it is. IndieAuth requires server-side logic, but server-side logic requires more maintenance and can be the source of security issues. I want to make sure that even if my server-side code breaks and I don’t have time to fix it quickly, my actual site content will stay up.

Future goals:

Implementation

It’s very “boring” – Python 3, Flask, WSGI, SQLite, behind Apache. SQLite is well suited for this, and I don’t even need to make any backups – the database contains only tokens, and if they are lost you will simply have to re-authorize them.

I host Interpersonal for myself at https://interpersonal.micahrl.com, although there’s nothing there that will interest anyone else. It’s open source on GitHub.

You might also take some inspriation with how I deploy it to my own server using Ansible.

Currently I’m calling this an alpha release, although I am actually using it on my own site.