Octocrabby is a small set of command-line tools and Octocrab extensions that are focused on managing block lists on GitHub. This project was inspired by an open letter supporting Richard Stallman, which has been signed by several thousand GitHub users I don't want to accidentally donate free open source support to.
This project may eventually get merged into cancel-culture, which is currently focused on archiving and block list management for Twitter.
This project is made of Rust, and you currently need Rust and Cargo installed to use it. If you've followed these instructions and cloned this repo locally, you can build the CLI by running the following command from the project directory:
$ cargo build --release
Compiling bytes v1.0.1
...
Compiling octocrabby v0.1.0 (/home/travis/projects/octocrabby)
Finished release [optimized] target(s) in 1m 35sMost operations require a GitHub personal access token, which you currently have to
provide as a command-line option. If you want to use the mass-blocking functionality, you'll need to
select the user scope when creating your token. If you only want to generate reports or export your
follower or block lists, that shouldn't be necessary.
One operation that doesn't require a personal access token is list-pr-contributors:
$ target/release/crabby -vvvv list-pr-contributors -r rms-support-letter/rms-support-letter.github.ioIf no token is provided, this command will output a CSV document with a row for each GitHub user who contributed a pull request to the given repository. Each row will have three columns:
- GitHub username
- GitHub user ID
- Number of PRs for this repository
For example:
0312birdzhang,1762041,1
0hueliSJWpidorasi,81465353,1
0kalekale,31927746,1
0ver3inker,53104897,1
0x0000ff,1977210,1
If you provide a personal access token to this command (via -t), the output will include several additional columns:
- GitHub username
- GitHub user ID
- Number of PRs for this repo
- Number of days between account creation and the first PR to this repo
- The user's name (if available)
- A boolean indicating whether you follow this user
- A boolean indicating whether this user follows you
For example:
0312birdzhang,1762041,1,3229,BirdZhang,false,false
0hueliSJWpidorasi,81465353,1,0,,false,false
0kalekale,31927746,1,1288,kalekale,false,false
0ver3inker,53104897,1,617,0ver3inker,false,false
0x0000ff,1977210,1,3176,,false,false
You can find copies of the output of this command in this project's data directory.
This allows us to see how many of the signatories were using single-purpose throwaway accounts, for example. As of this morning, only 82 of the 3,000+ accounts were created on the same day they opened their PR:
$ awk -F, '$4 == 0' rms-contributors.csv | wc
82 102 3282You can also check how many of the signers follow you on GitHub:
$ egrep -r "true,(true|false)$" rms-contributors.csv | wc
0 0 0And how many you follow:
$ egrep -r "true$" rms-contributors.csv | wc
0 0 0Good.
The CLI also allows you to export lists of users you follow, are followed by, and block:
$ target/release/crabby -vvvv -t $GH_TOKEN list-following | wc
24 24 408
$ target/release/crabby -vvvv -t $GH_TOKEN list-followers | wc
575 575 10416
$ target/release/crabby -vvvv -t $GH_TOKEN list-blocks | head
alexy,27491
soc,42493
jdegoes,156745
vmarquez,427578
gvolpe,443978
neko-kai,450507
hmemcpy,601206
kubukoz,894884
propensive,1024588
phderome,11035032The format is a two-column CSV with username and user ID.
In general it's probably a good idea to save the output of the list-blocks command before using
the mass-blocking functionality in the next section.
The CLI also includes a block-users command that accepts CSV rows from standard input. It ignores all
columns except the first, which it expects to be a GitHub username. This is designed to make it convenient
to save the output of list-pr-contributors, manually remove accounts if needed, and then block the rest.
target/release/crabby -vvv -t $GH_TOKEN block-users < rms-contributors.csv
08:46:41 [WARN] 0hueliSJWpidorasi was already blocked
08:46:41 [WARN] 0kalekale was already blocked
...
If you've set the logging level to at least WARN (via the -vvv or -vvvv options), it will show you
a message for each user who is either newly blocked or was already blocked.
You can view all currently supported commands with -h:
crabby 0.1.0
Travis Brown <travisrobertbrown@gmail.com>
USAGE:
crabby [FLAGS] [OPTIONS] <SUBCOMMAND>
FLAGS:
-h, --help Prints help information
-v, --verbose Logging verbosity
-V, --version Prints version information
OPTIONS:
-t, --token <token> A GitHub personal access token (not needed for all operations)
SUBCOMMANDS:
block-users Block a list of users provided in CSV format to stdin
check-follow Check whether one user follows another
help Prints this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)
list-blocks List accounts the authenticated user blocks in CSV format to stdout
list-followers List the authenticated user's followers in CSV format to stdout
list-following List accounts the authenticated user follows in CSV format to stdout
list-pr-contributors List PR contributors for the given repository
I wrote this thing yesterday afternoon. It's completely untested. It might not work. For your own safety
please don't use it with a personal access token with unneeded permissions (i.e. anything except user).
It's probably possible to include the account age in the contributor report even when unauthenticated—I just wasn't able to find a way to get information about multiple users via a single request except through the GraphQL endpoint, which is only available to authenticated users (and if you request each user individually, you'll run into GitHub's rate limits for projects like the Stallman support letter).
- highlight-rms-supporters is a userscript that highlights signers of the Stallman support letter in the browser
This project is licensed under the Mozilla Public License, version 2.0. See the LICENSE file for details.