toot

A simple command-line utility that allows you to post a "toot" (equivalent of a Tweet) on the Mastodon social network.

Installation

npm install -g toot

Running first time

When you first run toot you will be asked some questions in order for toot to authenticate with your Mastodon service

> toot
Before you start using toot, you need to authenticate with your Mastodon server.
...

You will be asked for:

• which instance of Mastodon are you posting to? - there are many e.g. toot.cafe
• what name you want to give your app? - the name you pick here will show up in your Mastodon settings under "Authorized apps"

You will then be asked to visit a long URL in your browser and be prompted for one further piece of information:

• the code displayed when you visit the URL?

This is a once-only operation. Then your configuration is saved (in ~/.mastodon.json).

Sending a toot

After the inital setup, sending a toot is a breeze:

> toot "I'm sending a Toot from the command-line!"

You can also pipe data from other processes into toot:

> cat longfile.txt | grep 'message' | toot

Options

• --visibility/-v [direct|private|unlisted|public] - the visibility of the toot
• --cw/-c - content warning text
• --config [path] - location of the config file
• --help - view help text
• --version - show version number

e.g.

> toot --visibility private "secret"
> toot -v unlisted -c "Knock Knock" "Who's there?"

Why would I want this?

Perhaps you want to set up a Mastodon account for servers you are looking after. They can then be easily configured to send status updates:

> 
> toot "$HOSTNAME is going down for maintenance. Farewell dear friends"
> toot "$HOSTNAME is up. I'm back!"

Reconfiguring

If you want to reconfigure Toot from the beginning, simply delete the ~/.mastodon.json file and run toot again to reauthorise.