pluss - A feed generator for Google+

What is pluss?

pluss is a lightweight web server which serves Atom-format feeds based on Google+ public post streams. It's very similar to plusfeed, but it's designed to run on a regular server as a tornado app, rather than on AppEngine. It also uses the official Google+ API to fetch its content.

It works similarly to a proxy server - you request the feed url via HTTP from the pluss server, it fetches a copy of the specified user's Google+ public posts stream, translates it into Atom format, and serves it back to you.

pluss will only proxy feeds for users who have given it authorization (which is acquired via OAuth2). Revoking authorization will result in the removal of the feed for that user.

pluss will also cache its feed results for a given user if memcache is available, thus reducing overall bandwidth usage, especially if multiple different clients are accessing the same feed. (Feeds are cached for 15 minutes, so it may take a few minutes after a new post is shared for it to show up in the feed if caching is enabled, or for a feed with revoked access to disappear.)

A running pluss server is available for general usage here.

Dependencies

Note that it is possible that pluss might work with earlier versions of some of these packages, but I do not plan to support anything less than what is listed here. Caveat emptor.

• Python 2.7+
• BeautifulSoup 3.2+
• python-memcache 1.45+ (optional, but required for memcached support which is highly recommended)

(tornado version 2.0 is already bundled with pluss for simplicity.)

Installation

Right now pluss isn't a PyPi package, so there's no setup.py or the like. Just clone the repository and you should have everything you need to run a server.

Configuration

Before running pluss, you'll need to create a pluss.cfg configuration file for it. There is an example configuration file named pluss.example.cfg. All of the fields in the example configuration are required fields - you can change the values, but omission is not allowed.

At a bare minimum, you'll need to change the values of the keys in the [oauth] section to your own Google API OAuth2 credentials:

[oauth]
client-id = 123456789000.apps.googleusercontent.com
client-secret = aBcDeFg_hIjKlMn_oPqRstUv

(The proper values to use can be found in the Google APIs Console under the 'API Access' section.)

You can also tweak any other portions of the config file - by default, pluss runs on all interfaces at port 7587. (PLUS on a phone keypad.)

Usage

To start the pluss server, simply run pluss.py

$ python pluss.py

(Invoking pluss.py directly should also work on systems supporting shebangs.)

Once pluss is running, you should be able to access it in a browser:

http://example.com:7587

Notes

• pluss will write out a app.pid file to the path specified in the config file, and will remove it when it terminates.
• pluss currently runs in the foreground (it's not really productionized yet), but you can background it with nohup easily enough, or run it in screen/tmux.
• pluss will ignore the setting for enabling caching if import memcache fails (but will write out a message to the log to let you know it's doing so).
• pluss is subject to normal Google API rate limits. If you want further access control of who can use your pluss server, use external measures (e.g. firewall rules, a reverse proxy doing authentication, etc).

Special Thanks

Though pluss was written basically from the ground up, there were a few portions which were inspired by or assisted by the work of others. The plusfeed codebase was extremely helpful in corroborating and speeding along some of my own original exploration of Google+ data parsing and Atom feed generation (though a significant amount of that was then reworked when the official Google+ API was made available). There are also two files, util/route.py and util/pid.py, which were utility code openly shared by individuals in blog posts - you can find the original authors and links to the sources within the files themselves as comments.

Licensing

pluss was originally created by Amber Yust.

As specified in detail in the included LICENSE file, this software is released under the MIT License. That basically means you can do essentially whatever you want with it as long as you keep the LICENSE file around (i.e. don't mislead people as to the original source/availability of this software).