twitterfs

Overview ¶

Command twitterfs is a read-only 9P interface to Twitter.

§ 1. Configuration

Twitterfs is configured via $HOME/lib/twitterfs/config like so:

; cat $home/lib/twitterfs/config
{
	"api_key": "redacted",
	"api_secret_key": "redacted",
	"access_token": "redacted",
	"access_token_secret": "redacted",
	"screen_name": "your_screen_name",
	"listen_address": "localhost:7731"
}

The keys/tokens/secrets can be obtained by creating a Twitter application at https://developer.twitter.com/.

The screen name is your screen name, used to fetch the list of followed users, to add to the root directory; see below.

§ 2. File system structure and operation

The server listens by default on 127.0.0.1:7731, also known as tcp!127.0.0.1!7731.

The root directory contains a control file named ctl, and a directory per user (screen name, to lower case).

At start-up, the root directory will contain only the followed users. Walking into a user directory adds it to the file-system (if the user exists).

Each user directory contains one file per tweet, named by its id. Upon first listing, the user directory will contain the latest 10 tweets. Walking to a tweet file adds it to the file-system.

It is not permitted to create or remove files or directories, nor to change their metadata such as their modification times or their names.

The file-system is read-only, except control files, which are write-only.

To load more tweets for a user,

echo newer user >>ctl
echo older user >>ctl

The tweets batch size is 10 by default. The command

echo batch 50 >>ctl

will change the batch size to 50.

To reload the root directory (the list of followed users), use

echo reload >>ctl

This will not remove unfollowed users, only add new followed users.