tweet-delete

tweet-delete

Simple to use CLI tool to help keep your twitter feed clean by removing old tweets and retweets!

• Unlike the various third-party services available, tweet-delete will remove tweets beyond the unfortunate 3200 tweet limit.
• tweet-delete is also more secure by allowing you to not have to send your data to a third-party service. Your tweets stay locally on your computer and never need to be uploaded anywhere.

Prerequisites

As of 2018, a Twitter development account is needed for this tool to work. Luckily this is a very easy process and anyone can create an account!

Below we will run through all the steps needed to get setup for successfully running the tweet-delete CLI tool.

Apply for a Twitter Developer Account

Go here to request a Twitter Developer Account.

1. Under the Hobbyist column, select the Building tools for Twitter Users option then click Next
2. Fill out the rest of the questions and forms as required.
3. When you reach the intended use section, enter something like the following:

A tool that will be used to remove a Twitter users tweets and retweets after a specified date. This tool will not store any Twitter or user data. Also, there will be no analytics done on any Twitter data.

When finished, submit the application. The review process is normally very quick and you should be approved within minutes.

Create Twitter API Keys for Authentication

Once you have been approved for a developer account, go here to create an app and generate API keys.

1. Login to the Twitter account that you want to delete tweets from.
2. Click create an app in the upper right corner.
3. You will be prompted to Apply for a Twitter developer account if you don't already have one (See above section).
4. Fill out all the required fields in the form.
   1. App name: This can be anything.
   2. Application description: This can be anything as long as its more than 10 characters.
   3. Website URL: I would suggest using this GitHub repo URL https://github.com/colbymillerdev/tweet-delete
   4. Tell us how this app will be used: This can be anything as long as its more than 100 characters. I would suggest using the description we used in the above section

   A tool that will be used to remove a Twitter users tweets and retweets after a specified date. This tool will not store any Twitter or user data. Also, there will be no analytics done on any Twitter data.
   

5. Click the Create button.
6. Click the Keys and Tokens tab on the next screen to view the API keys. These will be needed when running the tweet-delete CLI tool.
   1. Make note of the API key and the API secret key under the Consumer API Keys section.
   2. Click Generate under the Access token & access token secret section. Please copy down the Access token and Access token secret keys because you won't be able to see them again after closing the popup window without regenerating.

Download Twitter Data

The next step is to download an archive of all Twitter data for the account.

1. Open the Your Twitter data page.
2. Under the Download your Twitter data section, enter your account password.
3. Click the Download archive button next to Twitter.
4. Wait for Twitter to send you an email saying your archive is ready, then download it.
5. Create a folder on your computer where you will run this CLI tool OR it can be run directly in the unzipped Twitter archive.
   1. If deciding to create a separate folder, open the archive and copy the tweet.js file to the newly created folder.

Installing Node and NPM

This CLI tool requires having a version of Node and NPM installed on your computer. If you do not have these installed, check out this documentation.

Usage

Go to the folder containing the tweet.js file and run the following command:

npx tweet-delete tweets

Follow the prompts displayed in the terminal. These will ask for the starting deletion date, as well as the 4 keys from the created Twitter app in your developer account.

WARNING: THIS IS A DESTRUCTIVE AND PERMANENT OPERATION. ALL TWEETS AFTER AND INCLUDING THE DATE ENTERED WILL BE DELETED AND UNABLE TO BE RECOVERED.

Commands

• tweet-delete tweets
• tweet-delete help [COMMAND]

tweet-delete tweets

Keep your Twitter feed clean by removing all tweets before a specified date!

USAGE
  $ tweet-delete tweets

OPTIONS

DESCRIPTION
  ...
  Specify a date and tweet-delete will remove all tweets you've ever sent before that date.

See code: src/commands/tweets.js

tweet-delete help [COMMAND]

display help for tweet-delete

USAGE
  $ tweet-delete help [COMMAND]

ARGUMENTS
  COMMAND  command to show help

OPTIONS
  --all  see all commands in CLI

See code: @oclif/plugin-help

Author

Colby Miller | https://colbymillerdev.com

License

MIT