Matrix Wrench - a admin tool for operators and community managers
Are you operating a large server, bridge or bot? Are you managing lots of spaces or rooms?
Do you sometimes need to modify rooms outside of your regular account?
Try Matrix Wrench. It's is a powerful, open-source web app to view and edit room states. It works with access tokens from users and AppServices.
In my time at the Matrix.org bridges team, I had worked on a few of the largest bridges operated at the time. Routine tasks included supporting the community leaders, e.g. when room admins had made mistakes or became inactive.
With the administrator role of the bridge bot, we we're able to modify the room state, revoke rights and promote new community leaders to administrators.
What started as a lot of manual, error-prone work in the terminal with curl became a web app written for the job. It allowed us as operators and community managers to tweak the rooms easier and faster.
Wrong permissions? View them. Fix them.
Wrong room visibility? Easy fix.
Lots of unwanted accounts? Kick them at once.
Migrate a community to a new room? Copy the state and members you want.
Matrix Wrench is closely built around the Matrix API endpoint. Most buttons only fire one network request. Many actions have simple forms, so you don't need to look up the Matrix Spec in a hurry. And if you want to replicate any of the actions in Matrix Wrench, e.g. for an automated script, you can have a look at its Network Manager which shows a curl command for all performed requests.
Christian worked at Element, Nordeck and Polychat, developing and operating Matrix AppServies, bots and clients.
He is one of the founders of the Matrix Community Summits in Berlin, helped with booths and dev rooms at FOSDEM and FrOSCon, interviewed community members for the Matrix Salon Podcast and exchanged knowledge at the annual Matrix Workations in Austria.
To make his job a bit easier, he started developing his side project Matrix Wrench in 2021. As most of his hobby work, it's published under an open-source license for the entire Matrix ecosystem to use and benefit from.
His other tech hobbies include Web of Things, OpenStreetMap and self-hosting.