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 Flask 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.
pluss' major dependencies are:
- Flask
- requests
- python-memcached (technically optional, but highly recommended)
The included requirements.txt includes these, and also the packages necessary to run pluss within a high-performance gunicorn server.
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.
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'll also want to set the host field in the [server] section to match the hostname pluss will be serving under.
A debug version of pluss can be started by simply running main.py - it'll boot up on port 54321.
For production environments, you probably want to point a WSGI server (e.g. gunicorn) at main:app.
plusswill ignore the setting for enabling caching ifimport memcachefails (but will write out a message to the log to let you know it's doing so).plussis subject to normal Google API rate limits. If you want further access control of who can use yourplussserver, use external measures (e.g. firewall rules, a reverse proxy doing authentication, etc).
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).
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).