Epicyon, meaning "more than a dog". Largest of the Borophaginae which lived in North America 20-5 million years ago.

Epicyon is a modern ActivityPub compliant server implementing both S2S and C2S protocols and sutable for installation on single board computers. It includes features such as moderation tools, post expiry, content warnings, image descriptions and perimeter defense against adversaries.

Project Goals - Commandline interface - Customizations - Object Capabilities - Code of Conduct

Matrix room: #epicyon:matrix.freedombone.net

Includes emojis designed by OpenMoji – the open-source emoji and icon project. License: CC BY-SA 4.0. Follow request icon from flaticon.

Package Dependencies

On Arch/Parabola:

sudo pacman -S tor python-pip python-pysocks python-pycryptodome \
               python-beautifulsoup4 imagemagick python-pillow \
	       python-numpy python-dateutil certbot
sudo pip install commentjson

Or on Debian:

sudo apt-get -y install tor python3-pip python3-socks imagemagick \
                python3-numpy python3-setuptools python3-crypto \
		python3-dateutil python3-pil.imagetk certbot nginx
sudo pip3 install commentjson beautifulsoup4 pycryptodome

Installation

In the most common case you'll be using systemd to set up a daemon to run the server.

Add a dedicated user so that we don't have to run as root.

adduser --system --home=/etc/epicyon --group epicyon

Edit /etc/systemd/system/epicyon.service and add the following:

[Unit]
Description=epicyon
After=syslog.target
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
User=epicyon
Group=epicyon
WorkingDirectory=/etc/epicyon
ExecStart=/usr/bin/python3 /etc/epicyon/epicyon.py --port 443 --proxy 7156 --domain YOUR_DOMAIN --registration open
Environment=USER=epicyon
Restart=always
StandardError=syslog

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Here the server was installed to /etc/epicyon, but you can change that to wherever you installed it.

Then run the daemon:

systemctl enable epicyon
chown -R epicyon:epicyon /etc/epicyon
systemctl start epicyon

Check the status of the daemon with:

systemctl status epicyon

If it's not running then you can also look at the log:

journalctl -u epicyon

You'll also need to set up a web server configuration. For Nginx edit /etc/nginx/sites-available/YOUR_DOMAIN as follows:

server {
    listen 80;
    listen [::]:80;
    server_name YOUR_DOMAIN;
    root /var/www/YOUR_DOMAIN/htdocs;
    access_log /dev/null;
    error_log /dev/null;
    client_max_body_size 31m;
    client_body_buffer_size 128k;

    index index.html;
    rewrite ^ https://$server_name$request_uri? permanent;
}

server {
    listen 443 ssl;
    server_name YOUR_DOMAIN;

    ssl_stapling off;
    ssl_stapling_verify off;
    ssl on;
    ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/YOUR_DOMAIN/fullchain.pem;
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/YOUR_DOMAIN/privkey.pem;
    #ssl_dhparam /etc/ssl/certs/YOUR_DOMAIN.dhparam;

    ssl_session_cache  builtin:1000  shared:SSL:10m;
    ssl_session_timeout 60m;
    ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on;
    ssl_protocols TLSv1.2 TLSv1.3;
    ssl_ciphers 'ECDHE-ECDSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305:ECDHE-RSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:DHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:DHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256:DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA256:DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:ECDHE-ECDSA-DES-CBC3-SHA:ECDHE-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA:EDH-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA:AES128-GCM-SHA256:AES256-GCM-SHA384:AES128-SHA256:AES256-SHA256:AES128-SHA:AES256-SHA:DES-CBC3-SHA:!DSS';
    add_header X-Frame-Options DENY;
    add_header X-Content-Type-Options nosniff;
    add_header X-XSS-Protection "1; mode=block";
    add_header X-Download-Options noopen;
    add_header X-Permitted-Cross-Domain-Policies none;

    add_header X-Robots-Tag "noindex, nofollow, nosnippet, noarchive";
    add_header Strict-Transport-Security max-age=15768000;

    access_log /dev/null;
    error_log /dev/null;

    root /var/www/YOUR_DOMAIN/htdocs;
    index index.html;
 
    location / {
        proxy_http_version 1.1;
        client_max_body_size 31M;
        proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
        proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
        proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forward-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_set_header X-Forward-Proto http;
        proxy_set_header X-Nginx-Proxy true;
        proxy_temp_file_write_size 64k;
        proxy_connect_timeout 10080s;
        proxy_send_timeout 10080;
        proxy_read_timeout 10080;
        proxy_buffer_size 64k;
        proxy_buffers 16 32k;
        proxy_busy_buffers_size 64k;
        proxy_redirect off;
        proxy_request_buffering off;
        proxy_buffering off;
        proxy_pass http://localhost:7156;
    }
}

Changing your domain name as appropriate. Activate the configuration with:

ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/YOUR_DOMAIN /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/

Generate a LetsEncrypt certificate.

certbot certonly -n --server https://acme-v01.api.letsencrypt.org/directory --standalone -d YOUR_DOMAIN --renew-by-default --agree-tos --email YOUR_EMAIL

And restart the web server:

systemctl restart nginx

Running Unit Tests

To run the unit tests:

python3 epicyon.py --tests

To run the network tests. These simulate instances exchanging messages.

python3 epicyon.py --testsnetwork