Table of Contents

• A Small Demo
• Installation
  • Prerequisite
  • Option 1: Cargo install (recommended)
  • Option 2: Build from source
  • Option 3: Prebuilt binaries
• Mafa is for me?
• What is Mafa
  • How Mafa works
  • Why Mafa
  • About Mafa
• Supported modules
• Contributing
• License

A Small Demo

(captured by LICEcap)

Installation

Prerequisite

Mafa does not work alone, below are programs that it depends on:

1. firefox (91 or later)

2. curl (any version)

3. tar (any version)

4. gzip (any version)

Option 1: Cargo install (recommended)

This is recommended because by cargo install, you always get the latest stable version of Mafa.

If you have Cargo installed, then you can

cargo install mafa

# check installed version
mafa --version

Option 2: Build from source

# grab the source
git clone https://github.com/imichael2e2/mafa

# into source directory
cd mafa

# build
cargo build --release --features imode,twtl,gtrans

# check built version
./target/release/mafa --version

Option 3: Prebuilt binaries

Check releases.

Mafa is for me?

Mafa is for you if Mafa has whatever you can make use of.

However, Mafa is NOT for you if

• You want to browse websites without a web browser. (Mafa needs Firefox)

• You want to see every detail of a website. (Use your favorite web browser instead)

• You plan to crawl a whole website and extract all its data. (A dedicated web crawler or data scraper does a better job)

What is Mafa

Mafa is a command-line tool that helps people interact with online websites in a terminal(tty). It accesses websites through modules. Modules are child programs that rely on WebDriver to do their job. Each module has a fixed destination website and has a specific job for that site. With modules, users can browse websites without interacting with web browsers directly. The supported
modules are listed below.

How Mafa works

Mafa leverages WebDriver to achieve its goals. More specifically, Mozilla's GeckoDriver is in use. With WebDriver, Mafa can act like a human, browsing websites naturally for its user.

Why Mafa

Usable & Convenient

Unlike other counterparts, Mafa strives to balance usability and convenience: Mafa will try its best to finish the task on its own or instruct users to open web browser directly if it cannot perfectly handle the situation(such as in cases where the website is equipped with CAPTCHA or requires user login). What Mafa tries to be is a browser companion, not a replacement.

Neutral

The underlying WebDriver backs by a nearly full-functional web browser. Overall, Mafa default not to subjectively strip any feature a website user or provider can take advantage of, just like on a normal full-functional web browser.

Therefore there is no reason for providers to particularly prevent Mafa from accessing their websites, which likely leads to a negative result for both sides.

It is noteworthy that Mafa does not wipe out the user identity by default, as a regular web browser does. It is essential for website providers because while many websites abuse user privacy, there are always ones collecting it for a good reason, such as Ecosia.

Stable & Long-lasting

One of Mafa's goals is to handle websites stably for a relatively long period. Modern web pages are famous for their dynamic characteristic. However, Mafa can handle those dynamic and unpredictable web pages as effortlessly as the static ones.

About Mafa

Mafa is initially developed for (M)aking (A)PI (F)ree (A)gain. Here "free" is the same word defined in What is Free Software?, i.e., as in "free speech", not as in"free beer". Some websites provide their data publicly but do not publish corresponding APIs to access it, while others offer their data publicly in their carefully designed websites and APIs but with even more carefully designed pricing. Those websites are blocking users from accessing their public data by either not providing APIs or providing ones with non-trivial barriers, examples of disrespecting users' freedom.

Mafa is the one who fights against them and protects web users' freedom. Because Mafa believes that as long as the data is publicly accessible for all users without discrimination, the APIs to access it should be as well.

Supported modules

• IMODE: Interactive mode.

• TWTL: Twitter users' timeline.

• GTRANS: Google translation service.

Contributing

Mafa is still in early development, any contribution is welcomed!

License

Mafa is proudly licensed under GPLv3.

See LICENSE-GPL for details.