goANS — Automatic Notification System for the Second Life Marketplace written in Go

What's this for?

Almost two decades ago, a little-known feature of the Second Life Marketplace was inherited by Linden Lab when they bought the website from its previous owners: the Automatic Notification System, a very simple API that contacts a remote web server (chosen by the merchant) to automatically inform them when a new sale has been made via the SL Marketplace.

The most well-known example of this is Casper, now a fully-owned subsidiary of Linden Lab, and they're not telling us any of their secrets :-)

Compiling/Building

Tested under Go 1.20. If you don't have it, nor use it, this is hardly the place to explain everything. Suffice to say that if you have Go properly installed, all you need to do is to type go install goans and that should be ok. Alternatively, go build -o goans will drop a binary on the current irectory, which you can then place wherever you wish.

Configuration

Copy config.ini.sample to config.ini, fill with your details, and you're ready to go.

Mind you, everything will be ignored (for now).

You will probably need to get the Merchant Salt Code first. Just type your processor URL on the right spot on the Merchant backoffice, and LL will show you yours.

Configuring your server (OS & Web)

If your operating system uses systemd you can use the template under scripts/goans.service.sample as inspiration. Figuring everything out remains as an exercise for the user.

If your operating system uses anything else besides systemd (such as macOS, which uses launchd, or Windows which uses... whatever Windows uses), you're out of luck. For now at least, this has only been tested under Linux (x86 & ARM).

goANS uses port number 9045 by default (well, 904n5 is not a valid port number, for those of you who speak leet). It happened to be unused on my system. I then encapsulate it under nginx — a basic setup is shown under scripts/nginx-snippet.conf.

To-do: use FastCGI instead/alternatively (mostly to avoid using a preciously scarce Internet port). Or figure out how to get Go to use a Unix socket instead (that should be possible).

License

Licensed under a MIT license