stanfordio / truthbrush

API client for Truth Social

truthbrush

Truthbrush is an API client for Truth Social. Truthbrush is built and maintained by the Stanford Internet Observatory.

Currently, this tool can:

• Search for users, statuses, groups, or hashtags
• Pull a user's statuses
• Pull the list of "People to Follow" or suggested users
• Pull "trending" hashtags
• Pull "trending" Truth posts
• Pull ads
• Pull a user's metadata
• Pull "trending" groups
• Pull list of suggested groups
• Pull "trending" group hashtags
• Pull posts from group timeline

Truthbrush is designed for academic research, open source intelligence gathering, and data archival. It pulls all of the data from the publicly accessible API.

Installation

Truthbrush is not yet available on PyPI. To install it, run pip install git+https://github.com/stanfordio/truthbrush.git, or clone the repository and run pip3 install .. Provided your pip is setup correctly, this will make truthbrush available both as a command and as a Python package. Note that Truthbrush requires Python 3.9 or higher.

After installation, you will need to set your Truth Social username and password as environmental variables.

export TRUTHSOCIAL_USERNAME=foo

export TRUTHSOCIAL_PASSWORD=bar

You may also set these variables in a .env file in the directory from which you are running Truthbrush.

CLI Usage

Usage: truthbrush [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...

Options:
  --help     Show this message and exit.


Commands:
  search             Search for users, statuses, groups, or hashtags.
  statuses           Pull a user's statuses.
  suggestions        Pull the list of suggested users.
  tags               Pull trendy tags.
  trends             Pull trendy Truths.
  ads                Pull ads.
  user               Pull a user's metadata.
  likes              Pull the list of users who liked a post
  groupposts         Pull posts from a groups's timeline
  grouptags         Pull trending group tags. 
  grouptrends       Pull trending groups.
  groupsuggestions  Pull list of suggested groups.

Search for users, statuses, groups, or hashtags

truthbrush search --searchtype [accounts|statuses|hashtags|groups] QUERY

Pull all statuses (posts) from a user

truthbrush statuses HANDLE

Pull "People to Follow" (suggested) users

truthbrush suggestions

Pull trendy tags

truthbrush tags

Pull ads

truthbrush ads

Pull all of a user's metadata

truthbrush user HANDLE

Pull the list of users who liked a post

truthbrush likes POST TOP_NUM

Pull trending group tags

truthbrush grouptags

Pull trending groups

truthbrush grouptrends      

Pull list of suggested groups

truthbrush groupsuggestions

Pull posts from a group's timeline

truthbrush groupposts GROUP_ID

Contributing

Contributions are encouraged! For small bug fixes and minor improvements, feel free to just open a PR. For larger changes, please open an issue first so that other contributors can discuss your plan, avoid duplicated work, and ensure it aligns with the goals of the project. Be sure to also follow the code of conduct. Thanks!

Development setup (ensure you have Poetry installed):

poetry install
poetry shell
truthbrush --help # will use your local copy of truthbrush

If you prefer not to install Poetry in your root environment, you can also use Conda:

conda create -n truthbrush-env python=3.9
conda activate truthbrush-env

conda install -c conda-forge poetry
poetry install

To run the tests:

pytest

# optionally run tests with verbose logging outputs:
pytest --log-cli-level=DEBUG -s

Please format your code with black:

black .

Wishlist

Support for the following capabilities is planned:

• ...nothing right now! (Got an idea? Submit an issue/PR!)