dontvis.it

dontvis.it is a tool to escape linkbaits, trolls, idiots and asshats.

This tool tries to capture the content of an article or blog post without passing on your visit as a page view. dontvis.it also reads and displays (some) news articles otherwise only visible to "subscribers". Effectively this means that you're not paying with your attention or money, so you can read and share< the idiocy that it contains. (This is basically a repackaged Instapaper/Pocket/ReadLater/whatever.)

How it works

A user will paste a link, or type dontvis.it/ before the URL in the address bar and then the script goes to work:

• If the URL is found in the database a cached version is served
• If not:
  • cURL fetches the URL with a randomized webcrawler user agent, in order to not stand out in server logs
  • The web page is parsed through PHP Readability (by fivefilters.org) to remove ads and other stuff
• The user can now share the URL to the contents without providing traffic to stuff the user doesn't want to support and/or pay for

Install

Install the composer dependencies:

$ composer install

Install the node dependencies and build the resources:

$ npm install && npm run dev

(Or use make install && make build:dev instead of the above.)

Configure your web server setting the web root to the public/ folder or use Docker.

Edit the .env file with your database credentials.

Develop

Build CSS & JS files one time:

$ npm run dev

or

$ make build:dev

Build CSS & JS files and watch for file changes:

$ npm run watch

or

$ make watch

Build minified CSS & JS files one time:

$ npm run prod

or

$ make build

Docker

Use this database host:

DB_HOST=mysql

Create SSL certificate:

$ mkdir -p .docker/.ssl
$ openssl req -x509 -nodes -days 3650 -newkey rsa:2048 -keyout .docker/.ssl/server.key -out .docker/.ssl/server.pem

or

make ssl:create

Start Docker:

$ docker-compose up -d

or

$ make up

Access the site via https://localhost:3000/ and phpMyAdmin via http://localhost:8082/.

Stop Docker:

$ docker-compose down

or

$ make down

TODO

• Use memcache to speed things up
• Consolidate URL-caching so that www. and trailing slashes don't create separate caching
• Rehost images on Imgur

Built with:

• PHP-Readability 1.7.2
• Bootstrap 4.4.1

Thanks to

• gonedjur for providing the base of this tool