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These are the steps needed to login to Mastodon and get an access token for posting statuses from the CLI.
I'm going to set a $MASTODON_SERVER environment variable and use that in all of my curl commands. Obviously replace it with your server.
MASTODON_SERVER=c.im
First step is to register an app with your instance. Create a file called data.json with the following content:
{ "client_name": "my-app", "redirect_uris": "urn:ietf:wg:oauth:2.0:oob", "scopes": "read write push", "website": "http://example.com" }
Then send that as a POST request to the API:
curl -d "@data.json" \ -X POST \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ "https://$MASTODON_SERVER/api/v1/apps"
This will give you back a JSON blob with a client_id and client_secret.
Next you'll request a token. This uses password login, with the username being your email address. Replace the relevant parts.
curl -X POST \ -F 'client_id=$CLIENT_ID' \ -F 'client_secret=$CLIENT_SECRET' \ -F 'grant_type=password' \ -F 'scope=write read' \ -F 'username=$EMAIL' \ -F 'password=$PASSWORD' \ "https://$MASTODON_SERVER/oauth/token"
You should get back JSON that includes an access_token. Keep this (I store it in MASTODON_ACCESS_TOKEN) as it's what you'll use in all future API requests.
From here check out the Mastodon API docs.
I wrote a bash script for posting statuses which you can find here: