secateur icon indicating copy to clipboard operation
secateur copied to clipboard

Pruning Twitter one ugly branch at a time.

Secateur

Secateur is a web app that allows you to temporary block or mute a Twitter account, and all their followers.

It's hosted at https://secateur.app

People who want to use Secateur can either use the public app or, if their privacy and security needs necessitate it, they can run their own instance by following these instructions.

Setting up your own environment.

Secateur is a Django web application built to be run in a docker environment along with a cache server (redis) and database server (postgres).

To run your own instance of Secateur, you need the following:

  • recent versions of https://docs.docker.com/install/ and https://docs.docker.com/compose/install/
  • credentials for the Twitter Developer API
    • This requires registering for a Developer API account, and then registering your application
    • Ensure you enable: "Allow this application to be used to sign in with Twitter"
    • Ensure you add "http://localhost:5000/complete/twitter/" as a Callback URL (this allows django-social-auth to work)

If you have those, setting up your developer environment should be straightforward:

  1. Clone this repository.
  2. Copy .env-template to .env and add your Twitter API credentials.
  3. Run docker-compose up.

Once the docker containers are running, you can go to http://localhost:5000 and hopefully see the Secateur home page. If your Twitter Developer API stuff is set up, you should be able to log in to your own Secateur environment.

Once you've logged in, you'll probably want to upgrade your account to be the superuser, and enable Twitter API access (this is normally a manual step for your users, while secateur is still young):

$ docker-compose exec app ./manage.py promotesuperuser ${MY_TWITTER_ACCOUNT}