Goodbye

Goodbye is a Go application, when someone unfollows you on Twitter, it will Direct Message you their Twitter handle.

At its core, it’s a program that downloads your twitter follower list in certain intervals, and compares it with the previous list to find out who has unfollowed you.

It has the following execution modes:

• -daemon: Process continously runs and fetches the followers every 5 minutes (or specified $GOODBYE_POLLING_INTERVAL). Doesn't need extra storage to store followers list (stores in-memory).

• -http-addr: Process listens on specified port and checks follower list on each request to GET /goodbye. Needs extra storage (currently a GCS bucket) to store follower list. (Suitable for serverless environments)

• -run-once: Process runs once and exits. Needs extra storage (currently a GCS bucket) to store follower list. (Suitable for cronjobs.)

Setup

First, you will need a config.json file containing Twitter API credentials.

Create a Twitter application on https://dev.twitter.com and access tokens for the application. Save these and pass as environment variables to the application:

export CONSUMER_KEY=[...] \
       CONSUMER_SECRET=[...] \
       ACCESS_TOKEN=[...] \
       ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET=[...]

./goodbye -daemon

You can compile the application with Go compiler, or use the Dockerfile to build a container image.

Run with Docker

Clone this repo on a Linux server with docker installed and build the Docker image in the repository root directory:

docker build -t goodbye .

Then run the container and give it the arguments it needs.

docker run -d --restart=always \
    -e CONSUMER_KEY=[...] \
    -e CONSUMER_SECRET=[...] \
    -e ACCESS_TOKEN=[...] \
    -e ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET=[...] \
    --name=goodbye-agent \
       goodbye -daemon

Check if it is running fine: docker logs -f goodbye-agent.

Set up follower ID storage (for -run-once and -http-addr modes)

The -daemon mode stores the follower IDs in memory, however other modes need external storage (currently only Google Cloud Storage is supported) to store the follower IDs.

1. Create a new Google Cloud Storage bucket to store follower IDs:

   BUCKET_NAME=pick-a-name
   gsutil mb gs://$BUCKET_NAME
   

2. Upload an empty file named ids to GCS bucket

   touch ids
   gsutil cp ./ids gs://$BUCKET_NAME/ids
   

Use this gs://my_bucket/ids value as the -followers-file argument.

Demo

Author

Copyright (c) 2013-2019, Ahmet Alp Balkan

Made in Bellevue,WA and Seattle, WA with love.