Unfollow Ninja

Get notified when your Twitter account loses a follower

Used by ~500 000 Twitter users (11/2021)

🇬🇧 https://unfollow-monkey.com 🇫🇷 https://unfollow.ninja

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[Deprecated] This app was built mostly on top of Twitter API V1.1, which is now deprecated.

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 git@github.com:PLhery/unfollowNinja.git
• cd unfollowNinja/unfollow-monkey-ui
• change api.unfollow-monkey.com to you own server endpoints in ui/src/components/MiniApp.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 git@github.com: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 git@github.com: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_BULL_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:

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

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

# a secret key to sign cookies (ex. generate yours on https://password.new)
COOKIE_SIGNING_KEY=Kg8hfQoGj9GHjdKjsYqPtk6ShJqaoP

# optionally:

# -- The twitter account quoted in the notifications (ex. welcome to @[TWITTER_ACCOUNT]!)
TWITTER_ACCOUNT=unfollowninja

# -- The timezone use for follow time. ex: Europe/Paris
TIMEZONE=UTC 

# -- Default language for the notifications (for new users).
DEFAULT_LANGUAGE=en

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

# -- When this twitter user is logged in, it has access to the /admin/user/[username] debug enpoint
ADMIN_USERID=

# -- Sentry (API) DSN, if you want to report workers (or API) errors on sentry
SENTRY_DSN=
SENTRY_DSN_API=

# -- If you set these variables, the server will send some metrics to these statsd / datadog servers
STATSD_HOST=
DD_AGENT_HOST=
# -- The metrics will start with this prefix (ex metric: [prefix].check-duration.worker.[cluster-nb])
METRICS_PREFIX=uninja

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

You can help to translate the app on https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/unfollow-monkey/notifications/

Weblate will automatically open a PR to update or add the language in this repository.

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/