is-twitter

Verify that a request is from Twitter crawlers using Twitter's DNS verification steps

You may wish to verify that a web crawler accessing your server is Twitter and not spammers or other bots scraping your site while claiming to be Twitterbot. Since you cannot rely on the User-Agent header which is easily spoofed, you need to use DNS look up to verify that the IP address belongs to Twitter. Twitter is usually scanning URLs to detect metadata.

Install

npm install --save is-twitter

Example

const isTwitter = require('is-twitter')

let ip = '199.59.150.182'
isTwitter(ip).then((outcome) => {
  if (outcome) {
    // it's twitter.
  }
}).catch(console.error)

Example with express

app.enable('trust proxy')

app.use((req, res, next) => {
  let ip = req.ip || req.connection.remoteAddress
  isTwitter(ip).then(outcome => {
    if (outcome) {
      res.status(404).text('Nothing to scan') // block twitter crawler
    } else {
      next() // it's a user
    }
  })
})

Tests

npm test

License

MIT

Author

Rocco Musolino @roccomuso