WebFinger Server Software

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Paul E. Jones

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Feb 13, 2013, 4:35:31 AM2/13/13

to webf...@ietf.org, webf...@googlegroups.com

Folks,

As promised, I’m making my WebFinger server software available for those who want to set up their own server. You can find a link to the package on this page:

http://www.packetizer.com/webfinger/server.html

This software implements both WebFinger (current draft) and Host Metadata (RFC 6415), including LRDD. It will return XRD or JRD as requested by the client, but will also return the correct document type by default if nothing is requested explicitly. Since it does it all, it is a bit more complex than if it only implemented the WebFinger draft. That said, I didn’t think it was too much to just do everything, and so I did.

The code is written in Perl and intended for use with Apache, but it does not use any advanced Perl or Apache capabilities, so it should port with a little effort. The code is a simple CGI script about 1100 lines long or so. I have no idea how well it will scale, but scale was not my objective. If I was seeking higher scale, I would have turned it into an FCGI script, at the very least. I just wanted something that fit well within my environment. If it fits well in yours, great :-)

I was constantly updating this code to align with the ever-changing spec. It seems to be settling down now, so I felt comfortable publishing it. While I’ve tested the code quite a bit while writing the spec, I do not want to say it is flawless. It’s an initial release, so do expects some bumps. (That’s especially true for the documentation, since I just wrote it in a hurry knowing I’ll not have time to do it for the next few weeks.)

Feel free to send me questions or comments if you have any. I’ll be around off and on during the week, so please accept my apologies if my response not immediate.