tweetback Twitter Archive

Take ownership of your Twitter data. First talked about at Jamstack Conf 2019 and in this blog post.

• Referenced on Delete Twitter!

Demos

• https://www.zachleat.com/twitter/
• https://twitter.11ty.dev/

Features

• Built with Eleventy
• Each tweet has its own independent URL (with backwards/forwards threading!)
• Uses @tweetback/canonical to resolve other Twitter archives URLs (internal links stay in the archive and don’t link out to Twitter).
• t.co links are bypassed and original hyperlinks URLs are used.
• Links to users, tweets, non-truncated URLs.
• Nicer link formatting for links-to-tweets: @username/:id.
• Support some markdown: I sometimes use backtick markdown notation for code in my tweet text. This translates to <code> properly.
• Analytics:
  • See your most popular tweets
  • Who you retweet the most
  • Who you reply to the most
  • Frequently used swear words
  • Top emoji
  • Top hashtags

Usage

• Clone/download this repository
• In your terminal, cd to the folder of the project
• Install Node.js (there are many ways to do this depending on your system and preferences; most package managers provide a package for it)
• Run npm install

Populate the database from your Twitter Archive zip

1. Copy ./data/tweets.js (or ./data/tweet.js) from your Twitter Archive zip file into the ./database directory of this project.
   • Rename window.YTD.tweets.part0 (or window.YTD.tweet.part0) in tweets.js to module.exports
2. If you want to exclude Twitter Circles tweets (these are included in the archive, why 😭): copy ./data/twitter-circle-tweet.js from your Twitter Archive zip file into the ./database directory of this project.
   • Rename window.YTD.tweets.part0 or (window.YTD.tweet.part0) in twitter-circle-tweet.js to module.exports
3. Run npm run import or npm run import-without-circles

Build the web site

1. Edit the _data/metadata.js file to add metadata information.
   • username is your Twitter username (no @ symbol)
   • homeLabel and homeUrl are the the name and URL of a homepage or other link to include at the top of the main archive page
   • data.avatar should link to a 16x16 pixel profile picture; the default will use the favicon from the website at homeUrl
2. Run npm run build (will just create the proper files) or npm start (will run a server to look at them in your browser).
   • Optional: If you want the web site to live in a subdirectory (e.g. /twitter/), use Eleventy’s Path Prefix feature via the command line --pathprefix=twitter or via a return object in your configuration file. Careful: this is an option to Eleventy and not npm, so it needs to live after a -- separator (for instance, npm run build -- --pathprefix=twitter).

⚠️ Warning: the first build may take quite a long time (depending on the size of your archive), as remote media is fetched/downloaded into your project locally. There is currently no progress bar so be patient! Repeat builds will be much faster.

Fetch additional tweets from the API (optional)

Note: Twitter no longer offers free API access

If you want to fetch additional tweets from the API and put them into your sqlite database:

1. You will need a twitter developer token an a TWITTER_BEARER_TOKEN environment variable (from the Twitter API v2). Read more about App-only Bearer Tokens.
2. Run npm run fetch-new-data

Add your production URL to @tweetback/canonical (optional)

https://github.com/tweetback/tweetback-canonical has a mapping.js file that stores the existing twitter username → canonical URL mappings. These will be transformed automatically to point to other archives in all tweetback instances.

Publish your archive (optional)

• To GitHub Pages