Twitter mass follow (DEPRECATED)

!! This stopped working after twitter updated to their "new look".

This is a server-side twitter mass-follower + unfollower. It uses a scheduler and runs once every 24 hours, it runs as long as Twitter restrictions (rate limiting) for the day kick in, so it'll wait a day and do it again. It will decide either to follow or unfollow a bunch of people, depending how many you are currently following. It unfollows people that have been followed for at least 2 days. It always needs to keep your current following number under 5000, otherwise - Twitter restrictions kick in. If this thing runs on a scheduler every day, ideally your follower amount should grow.

It keeps track of followed/unfollowed users in Postgres or HSQLDB local file storage database (depends what profile you run it with, default is postgres). In case of HSQLDB, run it with -Dspring.profiles.active=hsql and make sure the app can create a directory named db in the root directory and create/modify files inside it. Also runs a cleanup job every day to remove older entries to keep followed table's DB row count below 8500, because heroku has 10000 DB row limit on free plan.

Interface to show progress: https://mass-follower.netlify.com/

Getting Started

These instructions will get you a copy of the project up and running on your local machine for development and testing purposes. See running for notes on how to run the project on a system.

Prerequisites

1. Clone the project to your local environment:

   git clone https://github.com/indrekru/twitter-mass-follow.git
   

2. You need to define environment variables:

   TWITTER_HOME_ACCOUNT_NAME
   TWITTER_BEARER_TOKEN
   TWITTER_CSRF_TOKEN
   TWITTER_COOKIE
   

   Where to find these values

   Log in to your twitter account and open up developer tools.

   • TWITTER_HOME_ACCOUNT_NAME - your own account name in twitter

   • TWITTER_BEARER_TOKEN - Passed in requests as header called:

     authorization
     

     Looks like:

     'Bearer whateverRandomNumbersLetters...'
     

   • TWITTER_CSRF_TOKEN - passed as header named:

     x-csrf-token
     

   • TWITTER_COOKIE - See your twitter cookie and extract 2 values:

     auth_token=whatever; ct0=same-as-x-csrf-token;
     

   If you run it with Postgres, you'll also need these environment variables:

   POSTGRES_URL
   POSTGRES_USER
   POSTGRES_PASSWORD
   

3. You need maven installed on your environment:

   Mac (homebrew):

   brew install maven
   

   Ubuntu:

   sudo apt-get install maven
   

Installing

Once you have maven installed on your environment, install the project dependencies via:

mvn install

Testing

Run all tests:

mvn test

Running

Once you have installed dependencies, this can be run from the Application.java main method directly, or from a command line:

mvn spring-boot:run

And now if all went well, watch the terminal spit out logs as it's doing its magic.

In production

This is project is currently in production.

Health

https://mass-follower1.herokuapp.com/api/v1/health

All followed records:

https://mass-follower1.herokuapp.com/api/v1/followed

Follower stats:

https://mass-follower1.herokuapp.com/api/v1/follow-stats

Commands

Deploy new version:

git push heroku master

Check logs:

heroku logs -tail -a mass-follower1

Restart:

heroku restart -a mass-follower1

Built With

• Spring Boot - Spring Boot 2
• Spock - Spock testing framework
• Maven - Dependency Management
• HSQLDB - Local file storage database

Contributing

If you have any improvement suggestions please create a pull request and I'll review it.

Authors

• Indrek Ruubel - Initial work - Github

See also the list of contributors who participated in this project.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License

Acknowledgments

• Big thanks to Pivotal for Spring Boot framework, love it!