Add pleroma-archive post

v2/content/posts/2024/pleroma-archive.md

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+title = "Generating a Static Website From a Pleroma Archive"
+date = 2024-11-25T20:21:44+10:00
+
+#[extra]
+#updated = 2024-06-06T08:24:45+10:00
++++
+
+Almost two years ago, in Jan 2023 I migrated from my Fediverse presence from my
+self-hosted [Pleroma] instance to a single user Mastodon instance hosted by
+[masto.host]. Since then I've wanted to retire the Pleroma instance, but I
+didn't want to just take it offline. I wanted to preserve my posts and
+links to them. That became a priority over the weekend so I built a
+tool, `pleroma-archive` to do it.
+
+<!-- more -->
+
+A few months after the switch to Mastodon I tried pulling my posts via RSS hit
+a runtime error. [I reported it to the project][runtime-error] but nothing came
+of it.
+
+I ignored it for another 18 months until this weekend when I tried to
+upgrade my PostgreSQL server from version 12 to 16 and migrate it to a new
+host. I chose the dump and load method of doing this but when restoring the Pleroma
+database it appeared to get stuck building one of the indexes. I eventually
+concluded that it was going to take something like 30 hours to complete. [I'm
+not the first one to hit this problem either][pg-restore].
+
+Retiring Pleroma had now become a priority. I discovered that there was now an
+account backup option in the import/export section of the settings. I
+downloaded my archive and set about building a tool that could generate a
+website from it.
+
+As usual I built the tool in Rust, my scripting language of choice. It's
+imaginatively called `pleroma-archive`. It generates an index page of all posts
+as well as a page for each individual post. The public URLs that Pleroma uses
+are not part of the archive, so for each post the tool does a `HEAD` request
+with the post id to determine the public URL of the post. The results of this
+are cached so it only needs to do it once for each post.
+
+With a little bit of help from [Nginx try\_files][try_files] a page like
+`notice/ARQGKLTJNiP8Lu2gT2.html` can be served at `/notice/ARQGKLTJNiP8Lu2gT2`,
+matching the URL it had when served by Pleroma:
+
+```nginx
+location / {
+    try_files $uri $uri/index.html $uri.html =404;
+}
+```
+
+The end result is at <https://decentralised.social/>.
+
+Source code and instructions for using `pleroma-archive` is available at
+<https://forge.wezm.net/wezm/pleroma-archive>.
+
+[Pleroma]: https://pleroma.social/
+[masto.host]: https://masto.host/
+[runtime-error]: https://git.pleroma.social/pleroma/pleroma/-/issues/3149
+[pg-restore]: https://git.pleroma.social/pleroma/pleroma/-/issues/3031
+[try_files]: https://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_core_module.html#try_files