Photo by Martin Brechtl on Unsplash

How to Write a Simple Bot for Nostr

Nostr is an awesome protocol, according to this website:

Nostr is a simple, open protocol that enables global, decentralized, and censorship-resistant social media.

The protocol is as follows:

Exists clients and relays, the clients are run by users and anyone can run a relay. The users are identified by a public key and every event is signed. The clients fetch or send data to the relays. The relays don’t communicate each other, only to clients.

On this article I am going to show you how to fetch and send data to the relays, but first you need a pair of keys.

Generating the Nostr Keys

Assuming you already have installed nodejs, lets install the package nostr-tools :

npm install nostr-tools

The code is the following:

import {generatePrivateKey, getPublicKey} from 'nostr-tools'
let sk = generatePrivateKey() // `sk` is a hex string
let pk = getPublicKey(sk) // `pk` is a hex string
console.log("sk: "+sk)
console.log("pk: "+pk)

If you save the code as keys_gen.js, you can run the code as:

node keys_gen.js

something like this is going to show:

sk…