This project is now archived. The code here has been functional but affected by Twitter changes. You can probably still run this locally, but no further support will be given and no component will be upgraded.
This is an app for crossposting between Mastodon and Twitter. The app is made so that multiple users can connect to it using the OAuth interface from both Twitter and Mastodon and choose options on how the crosspost should work.
If you just want to use it, there's one running at https://crossposter.masto.donte.com.br, which you can use from most Mastodon servers (except the ones suspended at masto.donte.com.br).
Post from Twitter to Mastodon
Post from Mastodon to Twitter
The crossposter will never follow anyone or post anything but the content you selected to be crossposted.
If you decide to crosspost from Twitter to Mastodon, remember to turn on notifications about when people mention you to avoid not seeing interactions!
The crossposter is made with multiple users in mind. For that reason, it can be quite a lot of moving parts if you want to self-host yourself. There's other good tools to self-host out there like https://github.com/AmauryCarrade/MastodonToTwitter or https://github.com/klausi/mastodon-twitter-sync and the others listed at the Bridges from/to other platforms section of the Mastodon apps. That being said, it should work even if you only want it for your own usage.
Ruby 3.1.0
Rails 7.0
Without extra configuration, a local postgres instance is needed. Node is needed for assets compilation, can be installed using nvm.
The poster uses the ruby-filemagic gem for detecting the types of the files posted. Follow the instructions described in the README to install the needed library and headers.
TWITTER_CLIENT_ID
) and consumer secret (on our side TWITTER_CLIENT_SECRET
).https://crossposter.example.com/users/auth/twitter/callback
.Note: If you are running side-by-side with Mastodon or other sidekiq-using software, you need to configure redis to avoid issues with mixed jobs. More info at the end.
You need to install Yarn and Ruby 3.1.0. Yarn has installation instructions for several OSs here: https://yarnpkg.com/lang/en/docs/install/ and Ruby can be installed either using RVM (https://rvm.io/rvm/install) or rbenv (https://github.com/rbenv/rbenv#installation). After you have ruby and yarn setup, you'll need to do:
# Install bundler
gem install bundler
# Use bundler to install Ruby dependencies
bundle install --deployment --without development test
# Use yarn to install node.js dependencies
yarn install --pure-lockfile
A separate user is recommended.
If you want the crossposter to send data to a statsd instance, you need to configure the appropriate variables in the .env file. You can check the example for reference.
Before starting for the first time, you need to generate the assets and setup the database:
bundle exec rake db:setup # sets up the database
bundle exec rake assets:precompile # generates the assets
An example nginx configuration can be found at util/nginx.conf
. It assumes the crossposter is running at port 3000, in the directory /home/crossposter/live
and the domain crossposter.example.com
needs to be replaced by your own.
An example of the configuration file is provided at .env.example
. To generate SECRET_KEY_BASE
, you need to run bundle exec rake secret
and copy the resulting hash. You need to configure an app on Twitter with permission to read and write. The credentials that they give you need to be added to TWITTER_CLIENT_ID and TWITTER_CLIENT_SECRET. \
If you're not using Librato, you don't need to fill any of the Librato variables.
To start the web app, you need to do:
bundle exec puma -C config/puma.rb"
If you are using systemd, you can create a service with something like:
[Unit]
Description=mastodon-twitter-crossposter
After=network.target
[Service]
Type=simple
User=crossposter
WorkingDirectory=/home/crossposter/live
Environment="RAILS_ENV=production"
Environment="RAILS_LOG_TO_STDOUT=enabled"
Environment="PORT=3001"
ExecStart=/bin/bash -lc "bundle exec puma -C config/puma.rb"
TimeoutSec=15
Restart=always
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
And put it on /etc/systemd/system/crossposter.service
And a second one like this:
[Unit]
Description=mastodon-twitter-crossposter-sidekiq
After=network.target
[Service]
Type=simple
User=crossposter
WorkingDirectory=/home/crossposter/live
Environment="RAILS_ENV=production"
Environment="RAILS_LOG_TO_STDOUT=enabled"
Environment="RAILS_MAX_THREADS=5"
ExecStart=/bin/bash -lc "bundle exec sidekiq -c 5 -q default"
TimeoutSec=15
Restart=always
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
And put it on /etc/systemd/system/crossposter-sidekiq.service
(note that RAILS_MAX_THREADS and the number of sidekiq threads should be the same)
These example files are provided in the config/systemd-services
directory. You may copy these files (with necessary modifications, if applicable) to /etc/systemd/system/
to run the system in the background.
If you are running the crossposter on a server with other sidekiq/redis applications, you need extra configuration to make sure everything is separated.
For a more in-depth information, you can check out Sidekiq Wiki, but one thing you can do it's to use another redis db, which could be done by creating a file in config/initializers/sidekiq.rb
with the content like
Sidekiq.configure_server do |config|
config.redis = { url: 'redis://redis.example.com:7372/2' }
end
Sidekiq.configure_client do |config|
config.redis = { url: 'redis://redis.example.com:7372/2' }
end
You need to replace all values with actual values relevant to your server.
.env
based on .env.example
and set DB_HOST=db
, DB_USER=postgres
, REDIS_URL=redis://redis
. You also need to set ALLOWED_DOMAIN
or BLOCKED_DOMAINS
to your preferences. Set CROSSPOSTER_DOMAIN
to the URL where the app can be accessed, such as http://127.0.0.1:<port>/
if running locally (3000
used as the port below.).http://127.0.0.1:<port>/users/auth/twitter/callback
, where the <port>
is the port you choose to launch the web-app in (3000
used below). Use anything for the website..env
file, set TWITTER_CLIENT_ID
to the "API Key" in the "Consumer Keys" section of your Twitter app. Set TWITTER_CLIENT_SECRET
to the "API Secret".FROM node:18-alpine as node
into FROM --platform=linux/amd64 node:18-alpine as node
and FROM ruby:3.1.0-alpine
into FROM --platform=linux/amd64 ruby:3.1.0-alpine
to emulate an x86_64 architecture.docker-compose up -d --build
.docker-compose run --rm web bundle exec rake secret
. Set this as SECRET_KEY_BASE
in the .env
file.docker-compose run --rm web bundle exec rake db:setup
.docker-compose run --rm web bundle exec rake assets:precompile
.docker-compose run -p 3000:3000 --rm web bundle exec puma -C config/puma.rb
, which lets you configure options locally in your browser 127.0.0.1:3000
, and perform user log-ins.sidekiq
with docker-compose run -p 3001:3001 --rm sidekiq
to start sidekiq, which performs the posting.You can add ALLOWED_DOMAINS=your.domain.com
to .env.production to only allow users from your instance to access the crossposter. This variable can contain multiple instances separated by comma.
At the same time, you can add BLOCKED_DOMAINS=evil.corp,bad.instance
to .env.production to block users from those instances to access the crossposter. They need to be separated by commas, spaces are optional.
You should only enable one at each time.
If you are an admin, you might want to make yourself an admin, which allows you to take a look on the status of the sidekiq queues (and solve possible issues that happen regarding users crossposting). To do so, you can run:
FEDIVERSE_USERNAME=your_user@your.domain.com RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake crossposter:make_admin
If you want a user to no longer be an admin of your crossposter, you can make so by running
FEDIVERSE_USERNAME=your_user@your.domain.com RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake crossposter:revoke_admin
The Sidekiq GUI is available at /sidekiq
for all admin users.
Run RAILS_ENV=test bundle exec rake db:setup
to create the test database (a postgres running locally is needed), and after that run the tests with bundle exec rake test
(or COVERAGE=1 bundle exec rake test
if coverage information is desired)
To start the project locally, you should use bin/dev
, which will start all needed components. You need to have your local environment variables configured, common issues are that sidekiq can't find redis, which will make it fail to start. See the Procfile.dev
for commands to run only some of the components.
For production, you need sidekiq to process jobs (that is, to post accross the networks), but you only need the webserver if you want to change configurations or to allow new signups. If you're in a single user setup, you can start and stop the webserver as needed.
If your server crashes and the crossposter is not correctly turned off, it might happen that jobs get into a state in which they are not able to recover by themselves. The symptom in this case is that no posts get crossposted and if you navigate to https://
When posting from Twitter to Mastodon the Crossposter tries to detect content warnings in the tweets and post them over to Mastodon. The detected CW takes precedence over the default twitter one if exists. Some formats are supported and more can be added in the future, but currently, this are the ones that will be recognized:
CW: content warning
my tweet
TW: content warning
my tweet
CW/TW: content warning
my tweet
TW, CW, content warning
my tweet
Spoiler: content warning
my tweet
CN: content warning
my tweet
Contains: content warning
my tweet
Contém: content warning
my tweet
All of these posts will be posted in Mastodon with the same content: my tweet
and will have a content warning of content warning
. The crossposter attempts to remove any extra spaces between the CW:
(or equivalent) tag.
This also works for quote-retweets. That is, if you are retweeting and you want to add a content warning to the tweet, you can just quote-retweet writing CW: content warning
.
This does not work for several tweets in a thread. Each tweet needs to have it's own CW.
Even though this is an experimental feature, it cannot be disabled. The reason is that content warnings are important for people in Mastodon and the crossposter should still try to keep it in a good environment, even if bringing content from Twitter.
Mastodon Twitter Crossposter is 100% free and open source. We encourage and support an active, healthy community that accepts contributions from the public – including you!
There's a high level description of the crossposter over at development help. You can start there and ask questions as needed!
Copyright (C) 2017-2018 Renato Cerqueira & other crossposter contributors
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License along with this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.