BotKit 0.4.0: PostgreSQL repository, remote follow button, and Fedify 2.x upgrade

[dahlia]

We're pleased to announce BotKit 0.4.0. This release brings a PostgreSQL repository for production deployments, a remote follow button in the built-in web interface, a new API for broadcasting profile updates to followers, and a significant internal upgrade to Fedify 2.x—with a few API changes to go along with it.

Remote follow button (#10, #14)

Until now, discovering and following a BotKit bot required users to search for it manually from their own fediverse instance. That works well enough for users already comfortable with ActivityPub, but it's a stumbling block for anyone who isn't sure how federation works.

@dodok8 (Hyeonseo Kim) contributed a remote follow button for the bot's built-in profile page. Clicking it opens a modal where the user enters their fediverse handle—something like @alice@fosstodon.org—and BotKit then uses WebFinger to discover their instance and redirects them to the OStatus subscribe URL, sending them directly to a follow confirmation on their home server. The feature was tested against Misskey, Hacker's Pub, and ActivityPub.Academy.

A big thank-you to @malkoG for originally proposing this in #10 and to @dodok8 for implementing it in #14.

Broadcasting profile updates with Session.republishProfile() (#18)

Previously there was no first-class way to tell your bot's followers that its profile had changed. Display name, bio, avatar, and header image updates would only propagate to remote instances when the bot posted something new—because that's when those instances would re-fetch the actor. The workaround was to just wait, which isn't always acceptable.

The new Session.republishProfile() method sends an Update activity for the bot actor to all followers, triggering remote instances to re-fetch the actor immediately:

// After updating the bot's profile...
await session.republishProfile();

This came out of #18, filed by @rmdes, who needed a way to push avatar and header updates from an admin UI without waiting for the next post. The underlying Fedify v1/v2 interop issue that motivated the request has been separately tracked in fedify-dev/fedify#651.

PostgreSQL repository (@fedify/botkit-postgres) (#11, #19)

BotKit has shipped with @fedify/botkit-sqlite since 0.3.0, which covers single-process deployments well. For multi-process or multi-instance setups, you need shared persistent storage, and SQLite isn't the right fit there. The new @fedify/botkit-postgres package fills that gap.

Getting started is straightforward—pass a connection URL and you're done:

import { createBot } from "@fedify/botkit";
import { PostgresRepository } from "@fedify/botkit-postgres";

const bot = createBot({
  username: "mybot",
  repository: new PostgresRepository({
    url: "postgresql://localhost/botkit",
  }),
});

If you already have a Postgres.js client you want to reuse, you can inject it directly. In that case the repository doesn't own the client and won't close it:

import postgres from "postgres";
import { PostgresRepository } from "@fedify/botkit-postgres";

const sql = postgres("postgresql://localhost/botkit");
const repository = new PostgresRepository({ sql });

The schema and tables are created automatically on first use. If you prefer to provision them ahead of time—say, in a migration step—there's also an explicit initializePostgresRepositorySchema() helper:

import postgres from "postgres";
import { initializePostgresRepositorySchema } from "@fedify/botkit-postgres";

const sql = postgres("postgresql://localhost/botkit");
await initializePostgresRepositorySchema(sql, "botkit");

PostgresRepositoryOptions supports a schema option (defaults to "botkit") for namespacing, maxConnections when connecting via URL, and a prepare option for environments like PgBouncer that don't support prepared statements.

The package works with both Deno and Node.js, following the same patterns as @fedify/botkit-sqlite. Install it from JSR or npm:

deno add jsr:@fedify/botkit-postgres
npm  add     @fedify/botkit-postgres

FEP-5711 inverse properties

BotKit now includes FEP-5711 inverse properties in the bot actor's outbox and followers collections. This improves discoverability and compliance with implementations that expect these fields to be present.

Improved handling of unverified Delete activities

When a remote server sends a Delete activity signed by an actor whose key fetch returns 410 Gone, BotKit previously returned 401 Unauthorized—which caused the remote server to keep retrying indefinitely. BotKit now responds with 202 Accepted in this case, stopping the retry loop without actually processing the activity or passing it to any event handlers.

Fedify 2.1.2 upgrade and breaking changes

This release upgrades BotKit's dependency to Fedify 2.1.2 and adopts Fedify 2.x's modular package layout. Most of the changes are internal, but a few things surface at the API level.

Message.language and SessionPublishOptions.language now use Intl.Locale instead of the custom LanguageTag type. Bot software versions are now plain strings rather than SemVer objects. The following public exports have been removed: parseSemVer(), SemVer, LanguageTag, and parseLanguageTag().

If you were using any of these, you'll need to update your code. LanguageTag can be replaced with Intl.Locale directly, and version strings can be passed as plain string literals.

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As always, the full changelog is available in CHANGES.md, and the documentation at botkit.fedify.dev has been updated to reflect the new APIs. If you run into any issues or have questions, feel free to open a discussion or file an issue on GitHub. Thank you to everyone who contributed code, filed bugs, and shared feedback—it genuinely shapes where BotKit goes next.