A simple webfinger service using nginx

My assumption is that you should be able to discover Mastodon accounts by searching for email addresses, which should in turn query webfinger.

So for a domain that isn't hosting Mastodon, you can set up a webfinger server. Or you can just hand code some json files and serve them using nginx.

Rather than look into installing a webfinger server, I just initially want to serve up the json files directly from nginx.

Set up a redirect under example.com (as suggested in RFC 7033)

  location = /.well-known/host-meta {
    default_type "application/xrd+xml";
    add_header Cache-Control "max-age=259200, public";
    return 200 "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?>\n<XRD xmlns=\"http://docs.oasis-open.org/ns/xri/xrd-1.0\">\n<Link rel=\"lrdd\" template=\"https://$host/.well-known/webfinger?resource={uri}\"/>\n</XRD>\n";
  }
  
  location /.well-known/webfinger {
    add_header Access-Control-Allow-Origin "*";
    return 307 https://finger.example.com/example.com/webfinger$is_args$args;
  }

Then set up a new domain finger.example.com

## Note this process isn't safe for non-ascii usernames and domains, and would need to be modifed to support them.

## needs the perl module for nginx to be active
## where query is "resource=acct:[email protected]" this should return acct/example.com/bob.json
perl_set $user_json 'sub {
 my $r = shift;
 my $wf_resource_json = $r->args;
 $wf_resource_json = lc($wf_resource_json);
 $wf_resource_json =~ s/resource=(.+)(\:|%3a)(.+)(@|%40)(.+)($|&)/$1\/$5\/$3.json/g;
 $wf_resource_json =~ s/[^a-z0-9\.\/\-\+_]//g;
 return $wf_resource_json;
}';

## map sort of works but falls over if non-lowercase requests are made
## and there's no built-in string normalisation
#map $arg_resource $user_json {
#default acct/none;
#~(.+)(\:|%3[Aa])(.+)(@|%40)(.+) $1/$5/$3.json;
#}

server {
  listen 443 ssl http2;
  listen [::]:443 ssl http2;
  server_name finger.example.com;

  ## certificates, etc

  location ~ /webfinger$ {
    add_header Access-Control-Allow-Origin "*";
    default_type "application/jrd+json";
    types { application/jrd+json json; }
    root /srv/webfinger;
    try_files /$user_json =404;
  }
}

Then create the file /srv/webfinger/acct/example.com/alice.json

{
  "subject": "acct:[email protected]",
  "links": [
    {
      "rel": "http://webfinger.net/rel/profile-page",
      "type": "text/html",
      "href": "https://mastodon.example/@alice"
    },
    {
      "rel": "self",
      "type": "application/activity+json",
      "href": "https://mastodon.example/users/alice"
    }
  ]
}

This file should be returned by a (redirect-following) request for https://example.com/.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct:[email protected].

In theory a search on any Mastodon instance for [email protected] should return the profile for @[email protected].

In practice this seems to work, but sporadically. Sometimes I see the webfinger requests in the logs, but often they fail to appear.

It's possible, of course, to redirect the webfinger requests directly to a Mastodon server - but in theory the webfinger protocol can be used to point to many different resources, so it might be better to keep these managed directly?

gwire/nginx_webfinger.md