delete-tweets

README.md

delete-tweets.sh

This util deletes your historical tweets from a downloaded archive file.

No guarantee, no support, use it at your own risk.

Preparations

1. Apply to become a Twitter developer first. Once your Twitter developer account application is approved, You can create a new app and get its Consumer API keys and generate Access token. These keys are used to configure tweet.sh
2. Obtain archived tweets by requesting to download your Twitter data. You can extract tweet.js file from the downloaded .zip file.
3. Download tweet.sh from the forked repo. Configure it following its README. tweet.sh requires curl, jq, nkf, openssl.
4. Download delete-tweets.sh from this gist. chmod +x delete-tweets.sh is recommended.
5. Install GNU date by running brew install coreutils if you decide to run this util on macOS.

Usage

Run command in your terminal: delete-tweets.sh /path/to/tweet.js

Whenever you quit the task, or it crashes accidentally, run again and it should resume the task from last working entry.

Configuration

• Change variable KEEP_DAYS to 365 in delete-tweets.sh, if you want to keep tweets posted within recent one year.
• Delete the file declared by LAST_TWEET_FILE, if you want to start over.

delete-tweets.sh

#!/bin/bash
# author: janlay@gmail.com

set -e

KEEP_DAYS=90
LAST_TWEET_FILE="$HOME/.delete-tweets"
TWEET_UTIL="tweet.sh"

function delete_tweet {
	# empty buffer before calling tweet.sh
	echo -n '' | "$TWEET_UTIL" delete $1 2>&1 || true
}

function undo_retweet {
	echo -n '' | "$TWEET_UTIL" unretweet $1 2>&1 || true
}

function raise_error {
	echo "${1:-Error occurred.}" >&2
	exit ${2:-1}
}

function main {
	echo -n "Preparing... "
	[ -f "$1" ] || raise_error "Missing archived tweets file: tweet.js."
	[ -f "$TWEET_UTIL" ] || raise_error "tweet.sh is required." 2
	local nickname="$("$TWEET_UTIL" whoami)"
	[ "$nickname" == "null" ] && raise_error "tweet.sh is not configured correctly." 3

	local date_cmd=date
	if [ "$(uname)" == "Darwin" ]; then
		which gdate > /dev/null || raise_error "gdate, the GNU date utility is required." 4
		date_cmd=gdate
	fi
	echo Done.

	local timestamp=$($date_cmd -d "$($date_cmd +%Y-%m-%d) -$(($KEEP_DAYS-1)) days" +%s)
	echo "This utility will delete tweets for $nickname before $($date_cmd -d @$timestamp +%D)"

	echo -n "Loading tweets from $1... "
	local items="`(echo '[{'; tail -n +2 "$1") | jq -r 'map([.created_at, .id_str, (.full_text | startswith("RT @") | tostring)] | join(",")) | .[]'`"
	local count=$(echo "$items" | wc -l | tr -d ' ')
	echo "$count tweets."

	local started=1
	local last_deleted
	if [ -f "$LAST_TWEET_FILE" ]; then
		last_deleted=$(cat "$LAST_TWEET_FILE")
		echo -n "Resuming... "
		started=0
	fi

	local index=0
	echo "$items" | while IFS=, read -r tweet_date tweet_id retweeted; do
		index=$(($index + 1))

		# resuming from last working entry
		if [ $started -eq 0 ]; then
			if [ "$tweet_id" == "$last_deleted" ]; then
				echo Found.
				started=1
			fi
			continue
		fi

		# print prograss and current entry
		echo -n "[$(echo "scale = 2; $index * 100 / $count" | bc)%] "
		[ "$retweeted" == "true" ] && echo -n "Unretweeting" || echo -n "Deleting"
		echo -n " tweet $tweet_id posted on $($date_cmd -d "$tweet_date" +%D)... "

		# compare dates
		if [ $($date_cmd -d "$tweet_date" +%s) -ge $timestamp ]; then
			printf "Kept.\e[0E\e[K\r"
			continue
		fi

		# execute
		RESULT="$(([ "$retweeted" == "true" ] && undo_retweet $tweet_id || delete_tweet $tweet_id)  | jq -r '.errors | first | .message // empty')"
		[ -z "$RESULT" ] && printf "OK.\e[0E\e[K\r" || echo "ERROR: $RESULT"

		# save working entry
		echo $tweet_id > "$LAST_TWEET_FILE"

	done
}

main "$@"