blakejakopovic/nostcat

Websocket client for nostr relay scripting

nostcat

Websocket client command line tool for nostr relay scripting, with docker and tor support

Examples

Using interactive input

$ nostcat wss://relay.damus.io <return>
["REQ", "RAND", {"kinds": [1], "limit": 8}] <return>
<ctrl-D>

Using stdin (supports multiple lines of commands)

$ echo '["REQ", "RAND", {"kinds": [1], "limit": 8}]' |
  nostcat wss://relay.damus.io

$ cat commands.txt
["REQ", "RAND", {"kinds": [1], "limit": 2}]
["REQ", "RAND2", {"kinds": [2], "limit": 2}]

$ cat commands.txt | nostcat wss://relay.damus.io

Using jq to query Nostr JSON events and select the event JSON

$ echo '["REQ", "RAND", {"kinds": [1], "limit": 8}]' |
  nostcat wss://relay.damus.io |
  jq '.[2]'

$ echo '["REQ", "RAND", {"kinds": [1], "limit": 8}]' |
  nostcat wss://relay.damus.io |
  jq '.[2].content'

Unique (dedupe) results as they come in (note: no longer applies sorting events - FIFO)

$ echo '["REQ", "RAND", {"kinds": [1], "limit": 8}]' |
  nostcat --unique wss://relay.damus.io wss://nostr.ono.re

With a websocket connection timeout in milliseconds

$ echo '["REQ", "RAND", {"kinds": [1], "limit": 2}]' |
  nostcat --connect-timeout 250 wss://relay.damus.io

Stream websocket data (like tail -f)

$ echo '["REQ", "RAND", {"kinds": [1], "limit": 8}]' |
  nostcat --stream wss://relay.damus.io

Output info log messages which can assist with debugging

$ echo '["REQ", "RAND", {"kinds": [1], "limit": 8}]' |
  RUST_LOG=info nostcat wss://relay.damus.io

Pipe events from one server to another (currently limited to 1 event at a time)

$ echo '["REQ", "RAND", {"limit": 1}]' |
  nostcat wss://relay.damus.io |
  jq -c 'del(.[1])' |
  nostcat wss://nostr.ono.re

Pipe events from one server to another (for multiple events, ctrl-C when finished)

$ echo '["REQ", "RAND", {"limit": 3}]' |
  nostcat wss://relay.damus.io |
  jq -c 'del(.[1])' |
  nostcat --stream wss://nostr.ono.re
  <ctrl-C>

Getting started

Using Cargo to install (requires ~/.cargo/bin to be in PATH)

$ cargo install nostcat

Building from source (may be unstable)

$ git clone https://github.com/blakejakopovic/nostcat
$ cargo build --release

Running inside a Docker image

$ docker build -t nostcat .

# Run the the docker image as an executable
$ echo '["REQ", "RAND", {"kinds": [1], "limit": 2}]' | docker run --rm -i nostcat wss://relay.damus.io

nostcat's Issues

Support multiple relays

you should be able to pass multiple relays as an argument to have it query them all at once.

So instead of 1 EOSE/OK we would expect N EOSE/OKs

Received unsupported nostr data:

When downloading events from wss://relay.realsearch.cc i get this error:
Received unsupported nostr data: "\n[\n\"EVENT\",\n\"RAND\",\n{\n\"id\":\"f9cb12c2e433b29a7441f897204804b83a5b9b7fdd903a759927029f17feac4e\",\n\"pubkey\":\"e022f5138944612a5cdbdaf13591fcf85c881f6616b8527eb24175aaca2c0aa0\",\n\"created_at\":1672993199,\n\"kind\":1,\n\"tags\":[\n[\n\"client\",\n\"astral\"\n]\n],\n\"content\":\"@5e7ae588d7d11eac4c25906e6da807e68c6498f49a38e4692be5a089616ceb18 Verifying My Public Key: \\\"highfar888\\\"\",\n\"sig\":\"621eba3ac2f6dc793c53a227a0553b83fca5355c8cc37546bbda87c983784af6e5ba6494639dd1612533e62b40249143852b061d225bc6a838d3a4823cf8323a\"\n}\n]"

De-dupe results when using multiple relays

Once we support multiple relays (#1) it would be nice to have an option to de-duplicate results.

Support for proxies / Tor

It would be nice if nostcat had built-in support for proxies (or just Tor, since my goal is to connect to a relay hosted on a .onion).

I found this tungstenite issue, but I'm not familiar enough with Rust to know how easy it'd be to implement any of the workarounds mentioned.

I can work around this in the meantime by doing torify nostcat, and was successfully able to connect to my onion that way. The downside is that since I'm running nostcat in Docker (see #5), that means installing extra dependencies in my container.