Issues with .well-known on Hostinger/Dreamhost

  • I recently moved from another host to Hostinger and started having issues with the ActivityPub plugin. I viewed support threads here and on github but none of the solutions I found worked. I tried editing the .htaccess file and using a redirection plugin, but it appears that Hostinger doesn’t allow redirects for the .well-known path.

    My solution: I run my site’s DNS through Cloudflare, so I used their redirect options (https://developers.cloudflare.com/rules/url-forwarding/single-redirects/create-dashboard/) to create redirects at the DNS layer rather than relying on the server. I searched the database for .well-known and came up with three:

    /.well-known/nodeinfo -> /wp-json/activitypub/1.0/nodeinfo
    /.well-known/x-nodeinfo2 -> /wp-json/activitypub/1.0/nodeinfo2
    /.well-known/webfinger -> /wp-json/activitypub/1.0/webfinger

    In the Cloudflare options I used the options URI CONTAINS then the /.well-known path for the incoming request and then used the STATIC option for the redirection URL. I checked the box “Preserve query string” as well.

    This resolved my issues. I’m posting this for two reasons. First, to help anyone else having this same issues with Hostinger, Dreamhost, or any other hosts that don’t allow modification of the .well-known folder.

    Second, to ask if there are any other /.well-known redirects I should have in place.

    Thanks

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • Plugin Author Matthias Pfefferle

    (@pfefferle)

    Thanks a lot for your investigation and for letting us know your solution!

    Thread Starter Jonathan Eggers

    (@jonamerica)

    Happy to help.

    Are there any other redirects needed besides nodeinfo, webfinger, and x-nodeinfo?

    Also, if I have the WebFinger and Nodeinfo(2) plugins, do those work differently than the ActivityPub plugin? Should I be redirecting Webfinger/Nodeinfo to different JSON queries? Do I even need these two additional plugins?

    Thanks for sharing Jonathan! After switching to Cloudflare Activitypub stopped working but your redirects did the trick.

    Is there any way to make this work on Hostinger without Cloudflare?

    Thread Starter Jonathan Eggers

    (@jonamerica)

    When I reached out to hostinger support they told me that it would not work on the shared hosting plan that I was on. They don’t allow access to the well-known directory at all on any shared hosting subscription. The only option was to upgrade to a virtual dedicated host.

    On other hosts, you could use a redirect plugin, but that only works if the well-known directory is accessible. Since hostinger blocks the well-known directory, you can’t use this method.

    If you don’t want to use cloudflare, you would have to find some other service that intercepts and redirects traffic before it gets to the server. Maybe fastly or akamai?

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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