Unfollow Ninja

Get notified when your Twitter account loses a follower

Used by ~150 000 Twitter users (07/2020)

🇬🇧 https://unfollow.monkey (branch unfollow-monkey)
🇫🇷 https://unfollow.ninja

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Feel free to reuse the UI on a personal server, but please don't reuse the name/logo on a public instance.

Indeed, this software is under apache v2 license which means:

• You need to aknowledge the use of this software and its license somewhere
• A modified version can't have the same name

Build the UI

• clone the repo git clone [email protected]:PLhery/unfollowNinja.git
• cd unfollowNinja/unfollow-ninja-ui
• change api.unfollow.ninja to you own server endpoints in App.js
• npm install && npm start to serve the UI in dev mode
• npm run build to build the UI static files in the build folder.

Then you can host it on github pages, amazon s3, netlify, your own nginx server...

Launch the server with docker-compose

• clone the repo git clone [email protected]:PLhery/unfollowNinja.git
• cd unfollowNinja/unfollow-ninja-server
• create a .env file (see .env file)
• docker-compose up --build

The server will be accessible on http://localhost:4000/

By default, the db files and logs are stored in /data subfolders. Feel free to edit these, and the port/address in docker-compose.yml

Launch the server manually

• clone the repo git clone [email protected]:PLhery/unfollowNinja.git
• cd unfollowNinja/unfollow-ninja-server
• install the dependencies and build the project npm ci && npm build
• create a .env file (see .env file)
• install redis and optionally set a custom REDIS_URI + REDIS_KUE_URI in .env
• launch the workers node ./dist/api/workers
• launch the api server node ./dist/api
• or launch both in the as a daemon with pm2 pm2 start pm2.yml

.env file

To get started, you'll need to create one or two twitter app https://developer.twitter.com/en/apps:

• One for the first step, which only need a read access, and a callback url = https://your-ui-url/1
• One for the second step, which needs a DM sending access, and a callback url = https://your-ui-url/2
• Both need to have sign in with twitter enabled

Then you can create a .env in unfollow-ninja-server to set some parameters:

CONSUMER_KEY=xxx # your first step app API key
CONSUMER_SECRET=xxx # your first step app API secret key
DM_CONSUMER_KEY=xxx # your second step app API key
DM_CONSUMER_SECRET=xxx # your second step app API secret key

WEB_URL=https://unfollow.ninja # Front-end URL (without any ending /)

# optionally:
CLUSTER_SIZE=2 # Number of workers, defaults to number of CPUs
WORKER_RATE_LIMIT=15 # Number of unique tasks managed at the same time, defaults to 15

SENTRY_DSN= # Sentry DSN, if you want to report workers errors on sentry
SENTRY_DSN_API= # Sentry DSN, if you want to report api errors on sentry

You can also set these parameters as environment variables.

Contribute

Open an issue with your suggestions or assign yourself to an existing issue

Translate the app to your language

• Fork the project
• copy unfollow-ninja-server/en.json to youLanguageCode.json
• fill translations
• change line 3 of unfollow-ninja-server/src/utils/types.ts and add your language code
• commit and submit a pull request

Motivation behind improving the legacy version

Legacy version: https://github.com/PLhery/unfollowNinja/tree/legacy

The legacy version couldn't scale and manage thousands of users, while still checking every 2 minutes the followers. Now, the program checks 100 000 users's followers in about 3 minutes with 12 cpus.

• Based on a job queue for:
  • Monitoring: I can see how many jobs/sec are happening, their errors, and rate limit them.
  • Scalability: Everything was happening in one thread. Now the work is shared between 8 workers/vCPUs.
  • Atomicity: When the server restart, wait for every atomic job to finish instead of interrupting them. (causing messages not sent or sent twice)
  • Reliability: If a job fails, prepare better retry strategies.
• Use Typescript to make code more bug-proof and clearer for contributors
• Split the webserver from the worker: When the worker was busy, the webserver was slow because everything was happening in the same thread.
• Use redis to store the list of followers as we need to read/write them really often/quickly
• I18n
• Use twitter's SnowFlake IDs to get the exact follow time
• New UI

Licensing

License (Apache V2)

UnfollowNinja uses multiple open-source projects:

Twemoji

Copyright 2020 Twitter, Inc and other contributors
Code licensed under the MIT License: http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT
Graphics licensed under CC-BY 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/