Bug Report: Cloudron does not support Ghost's ActivityPub/Federated Web Feature

[Sydney]

Just a heads-up to the excellent Cloudron team. Ghost is now available over ActivityPub, and site admins have the option of enabling federation activity in their Ghost settings. The feature is under "Labs."

• https://ghost.org/help/social-web/#compatibility

• https://activitypub.ghost.org/

But when Cloudron users turn it on, the site stops working due to .ghost/activitypub/ routes not being available. Here's the output of the JavaScript console, when the Federation feature is enabled.

My intuition is that this issue is due to Cloudron's default Nginx routing configuration. It probably does not know that it must serve the .ghost/ routes yet.

[nebulon]

The Cloudron reverse proxy just forwards all requests the app itself, so Ghost itself responds with a 404. Maybe some assets need to be rebuilt after enabling the option?

[jdaviescoates]

Yeah, be good to be able to enable this feature. Maybe need some Well Known settings for it too?

[Sydney]

Hi @nebulon, thank you for the prompt response. That does sound strange – I'm using a heavily customized theme (although my ghost app install is vanilla) so I'll have to spin up a new Ghost installation to double-check this further. In the meantime, @jdaviescoates would you be able to try replicating this issue? I'd appreciate if you can enable the feature, and see if you receive errors.

I made sure to restart the ghost app from Cloudron after enabling federation, and it didn't solve anything.

[jdaviescoates]

Well enabling it worked.

But it doesn't seem to really actually work.

After enabling it I was redirected to ghost/#/activitypub/explore but

But I can't actually post any notes:

And for most of the links I just get:

So, I didn't break my site, but it also just doesn't work

[Sydney]

Yes, that's exactly the same issue I faced. Enabling it does work, but it looks like the social/activitypub features are broken.

[scooke]

Well, it's in beta right now anyway, and only then on Ghost(Pro) - https://ghost.org/help/social-web/ . Give it time.

EDIT: I kept reading and at the very end it says it's open to all customers... is that self-hosters too?

BUT, there is this line in the middle of the article "At the moment, short-form posts that you publish here don't show up on your website. They just go out to your followers on the social web." So, try following someone first, then post. Feel free to follow me @shane@social.futurnumerique.com. Let me know your handle, I will follow you, and when you post from your Ghost blog I'll try to see if I can see it.

[jdaviescoates]

@scooke said in Bug Report: Cloudron does not support Ghost's ActivityPub/Federated Web Feature:

So, try following someone first, then post.

At least for me I couldn't follow anyone as searching for accounts just doesn't work.

[Sydney]

@scooke Yes, I can confirm that it's not an issue of not being able to follow people. As you can see from the screenshot in my original bug report, the routes simply do not work.

[bmann]

I think this is only for Ghost Pro at the moment. I have the same loading error. Interested to see when / if it is enabled for self hosters.

[jdaviescoates]

@bmann sounds like the intention is for it to ship with Ghost 6.0:

As shown at the top of https://ghost.org/help/social-web/

[jrl-abstract27]

now that we are on ghost 6.0 any updates ? it seems that
Cloudron does not currently support Ghost's ActivityPub/Federated Web Feature, as confirmed by bug reports showing that site admins can enable federation activity in their Ghost settings, but when Cloudron users turn it on, the site stops working due to .ghost/activitypub/ routes not being available
The core issue is that ActivityPub requires specific routes (/.ghost/activitypub/*, /.well-known/webfinger and /.well-known/nodeinfo) to be proxied to the ActivityPub service Serve federated apps from root domain | Cloudron Forum, but Cloudron's reverse proxy configuration doesn't know how to handle these routes yet.

[girish]

@jrl-abstract27 said in Bug Report: Cloudron does not support Ghost's ActivityPub/Federated Web Feature:

The core issue is that ActivityPub requires specific routes (/.ghost/activitypub/*, /.well-known/webfinger and /.well-known/nodeinfo) to be proxied to the ActivityPub service Serve federated apps from root domain | Cloudron Forum, but Cloudron's reverse proxy configuration doesn't know how to handle these routes yet.

I assume the set up has to be done wherever root domain is hosted (which could be in Cloudron or outside Cloudron)? If in Cloudron, you can set up the route inside the app. For example, if you have Surfer, just set up those routes to server whatever they need to serve.

[David 0]

I’m hoping to get some support for this feature on Cloudron soon. I’d love to use fediverse support on my Ghost-powered websites. I think it might be possible to have multiple Ghost instances running on the same server, but I’m not sure if there are any potential issues with that.

[axbom]

Just adding my voice to say that I'm keen for this to get up and running as well. The ActivityPub integration has been a long-awaited feature with Ghost 6.0, and it was a bit of an anti-climax to realise it's not working on the Cloudron app version yet.