vxTwitter

(A fork of TwitFix) Basic flask server that serves fixed twitter video embeds to desktop discord by using either the Twitter API or Youtube-DL to grab tweet video information. This also automatically embeds the first link in the text of non video tweets (API Only)

Differences from fxtwitter

fxtwitter exposed all recently processed tweets publicly via a "latest" and "top" page.

Even though Tweets are public, it was a personal concern for me that a tweet with potentially sensitive information in it could suddenly be shown to however many people were browsing the latest tweets page, and could be used as a tool for harassment. This was removed in The following commit

How to use (discord side)

just put the url to the server, and directly after, the full URL to the tweet you want to embed

I now have a copy of this running on a Linode server, you can use it via the following url

https://vxtwitter.com/[twitter video url] or [last half of twitter url] (everything past twitter.com/)

You can also simply type out 'vx' directly before 'twitter.com' in any valid twitter video url, and that will convert it into a working vxTwitter url, for example:

Note: If you enjoy this service, please considering donating via Ko-Fi to help cover server costs

I do not monitor any tweets processed by this server. Additionally, if you plan on hosting the code yourself and are concerned about this, be sure to check how to disable logging on the web server you are using (i.e Nginx)

How to run (server side)

this script uses the youtube-dl python module, along with flask, twitter and pymongo, so install those with pip (you can use pip install -r requirements.txt) and start the server with python twitfix.py

I have included some files to give you a head start on setting this server up with uWSGI, though if you decide to use uWSGI I suggest you set up mongoDB link caching

Config

vxTwitter generates a config.json in its root directory the first time you run it, the options are:

API - This will be where you put the credentials for your twitter API if you use this method

database - This is where you put the URL to your mongoDB database if you are using one

link_cache - (Options: db, json)

• db: Caches all links to a mongoDB database. This should be used it you are using uWSGI and are not just running the script on its own as one worker
• json: This saves cached links to a local links.json file
• none: Does not cache requests. Not reccomended as you can easily use up your Twitter API credits with this. Intended for use with another cache system (i.e NGINX uwsgi_cache)

method - ( Options: youtube-dl, api, hybrid )

• youtube-dl: the original method for grabbing twitter video links, this uses a guest token provided via youtube-dl and should work well for individual instances, but may not scale up to a very large amount of usage

• api: this directly uses the twitter API to grab tweet info, limited to 900 calls per 15m

• hybrid: This will start off by using the twitter API to grab tweet info, but if the rate limit is reached or the api fails for any other reason it will switch over to youtube-dl to avoid downtime

color - Accepts a hex formatted color code, can change the embed color

appname - Can change the app name easily wherever it's shown

repo - used to change the repo url that some links redirect to

url - used to tell the user where to look for the oembed endpoint, make sure to set this to your public facing url

combination_method - using c.vxtwitter as the url causes vxTwitter to combine all images in the post into one. This is CPU intensive, so you might not want it running on the same machine that's serving requests. When combination_method is set to local, it will use the local machine to combine the images. This requires pillow to be installed. If you want to use another server, replace local with the URL to the endpoint which combines images. Both methods use the code in the combineImg module. Inside, there's also a Dockerfile intended to be deployed as a combination endpoint on an AWS Lambda function.

apiMirrors - During an influx of traffic (i.e when Twitter embeds break!) it's very likely that Twitter will begin to block you for sending too many requests. This is an array of replacement Twitter API URLs which can be called upon when requesting tweet info locally fails. An example of an implementation of an API Mirror is in the twExtract directory, and is intended to be hosted on AWS Lambda. If multiple mirror URLs are specified, one will be selected at random.

This project is licensed under the Do What The Fuck You Want Public License

Other stuff

We check for t.co links in non video tweets, and if one is found, we direct the discord useragent to embed that link directly, this means that twitter links containing youtube / vimeo links will automatically embed those as if you had just directly linked to that content