Nitter

Nitter is an alternative Twitter front-end with the focus on privacy. According to its author, it is inspired by the invidio.us project and is released under GPL 3 license.

Here are some of Nitter features:

• No JavaScript or Twitter ads
• Prevents Twitter from tracking your IP or JavaScript fingerprint
• No rate limits or developer account required
• Lightweight, docker image is about 5Mb in size
• Native RSS feeds
• Responsive UI design

Screenshot

Usage

We use docker composer to manage the nitter instance.

Installation

Create a directory for the nitter deployment. Create subdirectories data/nitter and data/redis to keep all nitter and redis data.

Here is the docker-compose.yml file:

version: '3.3'

services:
  app:
    image: epenguincom/nitter:latest
    container_name: nitter
    restart: always
    depends_on:
      - redis
    volumes:
      - ./data/nitter:/data
    ports:
      - "127.0.0.1:8080:8080"
    environment:
      - REDIS_HOST="redis"

  redis:
    image: redis:alpine
    container_name: redis
    restart: always
    volumes:
      - ./data/redis:/data

Initialization

Run the following command to bootstrap/populate nitter configuration file and working directories.

$ docker-compose run app init

Make any necessary changes to the configuration file data/nitter/nitter.conf before run the instance.

Running the instance

This image has a builtin health check mechanism to terminate the container if any problems occur. Therefore, it is desired that we should start the container with auto restart enabled.

To start the container in detached mode, run the following command:

$ docker-compose up -d

It's recommend to deploy a reverse proxy to provide the public access.

For nginx, here is the sample setup with letsencryp for your reference:

server {
    listen [::]:443 ssl;
    listen 443 ssl;

    server_name server.tld;

    ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/server.tld/fullchain.pem;
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/server.tld/privkey.pem;
    include /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-nginx.conf; 
    ssl_dhparam /etc/letsencrypt/ssl-dhparams.pem; 

    location / {
        proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;

        proxy_pass http://localhost:8080;
    }
}

Update

Nitter is still under active development. Docker images for nitter will be updated constantly.

To apply the latest image, just run the following commands:

$ docker-compose down
$ docker-compose pull
$ docker-compose up -d