Easily publish a post on Pixelfed in PHP

Pixelfed is a decentralized social network designed for sharing photos and images, offering an ethical and privacy-friendly alternative to platforms like Instagram. Based on the ActivityPub protocol, it allows users to create or join independent instances, while interacting with the federation as a whole. With an ad-free approach, total respect for personal data and familiar features such as albums, stories and interactions, Pixelfed offers a community experience focused on transparency and creativity.

After this presentation of the Pixelfed service, we’ll publish a post on the Pixelfed network with PHP.

Prerequisites

First of all, you need an account on a Pixelfed instance. In my case, I’m using the pixelfed.social instance.

You also need a personal access token.

To do this

Connect to your Pixelfed instance
Click on your avatar in the top right-hand corner
Click on “Profile
Click on the “Edit profile” button
Click on the “Applications” tab
Click on the “Create New Token” link
Define the application name: in our case, I’ll call it “PixelBot”.
Check the write extents
Click on the “Create” button
Retrieve your personal access token

Theory

Pixelfed uses (more or less) the same endpoints as Mastodon, whose documentation is available online.

In our case, we’ll use :

POST /api/v1/media
POST /api/v1/statuses

Implementation

We’ll be implementing PHP 8.4 with the Curl extension installed and enabled.

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<?php

const PIXELFED_ACCESS_TOKEN = 'XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX';
const PIXELFED_INSTANCE = 'https://pixelfed.social';

enum PixelfedStatusVisibility: string
{
  case Direct = 'direct';
  case Private = 'private';
  case Public = 'public';
  case Unlisted = 'unlisted';
}

function fnPostPixelfed(
  string $pathMedia,
  string $descriptionMedia,
  string $status,
  string $language = 'en',
  PixelfedStatusVisibility $visibility = PixelfedStatusVisibility::Public
  
) {
  // Upload the media
  $hCurl = curl_init();
  curl_setopt_array($hCurl, [
    CURLOPT_URL => PIXELFED_INSTANCE . '/api/v1/media',
    CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
    CURLOPT_POST => true,
    CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER => [
      'Authorization: Bearer '.PIXELFED_ACCESS_TOKEN,
      'Accept-Charset: utf-8'
    ],
    CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS => [
      'file' => curl_file_create($pathMedia, 'image/jpg', $pathMedia),
      'description' => $descriptionMedia,
    ],
    CURLOPT_TIMEOUT => 20
  ]);
  $response1 = curl_exec($hCurl);
  curl_close($hCurl);
  $mediaResponse = json_decode($response1, true);

  // Post the status
  $hCurl = curl_init();
  curl_setopt_array($hCurl, [
    CURLOPT_URL => PIXELFED_INSTANCE . '/api/v1/statuses',
    CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
    CURLOPT_POST => true,
    CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER => [
      'Authorization: Bearer '.PIXELFED_ACCESS_TOKEN,
      'Content-Type: application/json',
      'Accept: application/json',
      'Accept-Charset: utf-8'
    ],
    CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS => json_encode([
      'status' => $status,
      'language' => $language,
      'visibility' => $visibility->value,
      'media_ids' => [
        $mediaResponse['id'],
      ],
    ]),
    CURLOPT_TIMEOUT => 20
  ]);
  $response2 = curl_exec($hCurl);
  curl_close($hCurl);

  return json_decode($response2, true);
}

// Use a generated image for testing
$dataImage = file_get_contents('https://picsum.photos/400/600');
file_put_contents('generated.jpg', $dataImage);

$response = fnPostPixelfed(
  'generated.jpg',
  'Generated Media',
  '🚧 Ceci est un test 🚧',
  'fr'
);

var_dump($response['url']);

@unlink('generated.jpg');

As you can see, uploading is a two-stage process: first, media upload, then post creation.

Conclusion

After simply executing the code, here’s how it looks:

After running the code, you’ll notice that

the application name is not displayed
emojis can also be easily used in the code.

Easily publish a post on Pixelfed in PHP

Prerequisites

Theory

Implementation

Conclusion

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