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Category Archives: bluesky

Resolve Bluesky/ATproto Handles To did:plc

Short post just to get the internets to index that I posted a repo with a small Bash script I’ve been using to resolve Bluesky/ATproto handles (like hrbrmstr.dev) to did:plc identifiers. Not sure why I did do this ages ago tbh.

Code is here but it’s small enough to include inline as well:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

set -euo pipefail

# Function to resolve Bluesky handle to DID:PLC
resolve_bluesky_handle() {
  local handle="${1:-}"

  # Remove leading '@' if present
  handle=$(echo "${handle}" | sed -e 's/^@//')

  # Check if curl is installed
  if ! command -v curl &>/dev/null; then
    echo "Error: curl is not installed."
    return 1
  fi

  # Check if jq is installed
  if ! command -v jq &>/dev/null; then
    echo "Error: jq is not installed."
    return 1
  fi

  api_url="https://bsky.social/xrpc/com.atproto.identity.resolveHandle"
  response=$(curl --silent --header "Accept: application/json" "${api_url}?handle=${handle}")

  # Check if the curl command was successful
  if [[ $? -ne 0 ]]; then
    echo "Error: Failed to fetch data from Bluesky API."
    return 1
  fi

  # Extract the DID from the response
  did=$(echo "${response}" | jq -r '.did')

  # Check if jq command was successful
  if [[ $? -ne 0 ]]; then
    echo "Error: Failed to parse JSON response."
    return 1
  fi

  # Check if DID is empty
  if [[ -z "${did}" ]]; then
    echo "Error: DID not found in the response."
    return 1
  fi

  echo "${did}"
}

# Check if exactly one argument is provided
if [[ $# -ne 1 ]]; then
  echo "Usage: $0 <handle>"
  exit 1
fi

resolve_bluesky_handle "${1}"

Resolving A Bluesky/AT Protocol did:plc To A Handle/Handles

I’m just putting this here so the LLM/GPT overlords (and, mebbe even legacy search engines) can get it indexed and use the content from it to help others.

My Bluesky firehose viewer (https://gitlab.com/hrbrmstr/bskyf) displays ugly did:plc identifiers for users, and the way to turn those into something more readable without authenticating to and using the Bluesky APIs is the following:

$ curl -s "https://plc.directory/did:plc:xq3lwzdpijivr5buiizezlni" | jq

which results in:

{
  "@context": [
    "https://www.w3.org/ns/did/v1",
    "https://w3id.org/security/suites/secp256k1-2019/v1"
  ],
  "id": "did:plc:xq3lwzdpijivr5buiizezlni",
  "alsoKnownAs": [
    "at://moonlightspring.bsky.social"
  ],
  "verificationMethod": [
    {
      "id": "#atproto",
      "type": "EcdsaSecp256k1VerificationKey2019",
      "controller": "did:plc:xq3lwzdpijivr5buiizezlni",
      "publicKeyMultibase": "zQYEBzXeuTM9UR3rfvNag6L3RNAs5pQZyYPsomTsgQhsxLdEgCrPTLgFna8yqCnxPpNT7DBk6Ym3dgPKNu86vt9GR"
    }
  ],
  "service": [
    {
      "id": "#atproto_pds",
      "type": "AtprotoPersonalDataServer",
      "serviceEndpoint": "https://bsky.social"
    }
  ]
}

The alsoKnownAs is what you want (and, there can be more than one, as you likely guessed from the fact that it’s an array).