rettention

README

rettention

rettention is a command line tool to apply a retention policy to your Reddit posts and comments. The program executes one batch of deletions in a single run, and it should be set up in a cron job to maintain an ongoing retention policy.

In order to use rettention, you will need the ID and app secret of a registered reddit app for API access. You can set one up for yourself at https://www.reddit.com/prefs/apps.

Command Line Flags

rettention expects a single command line argument, -c or --config-file, indicating the location of a YAML config file. If not set, this will default to rettention.yaml in the current working directory.

Configuration File

Configure rettention with a YAML configuration file containing the following values:

• app_id: The Reddit app ID.
• app_secret: The secret for your Reddit app.
• serve_address: The address at which to run the local server for OAuth. For example use :3000 to run on localhost at port 3000.
• redirect_uri: The redirect URI to use for OAuth. If you used :3000 for serve_address then the corresponding redirect_uri would be http://localhost:3000
• credential_path: The file to write Reddit OAuth credentials to.
• users: A map from user name to user configuration.

Each entry in the users map should have the username as its key and the following values:

• comment_duration: The amount of time to retain comments by this user. This must be either the string "forever" to turn off deletion, or a duration string that can be parsed by Go's time.ParseDuration.
• post_duration: The amount of time to retain posts by this user. This must be either the string "forever" to turn off deletion, or a duration string that can be parsed by Go's time.ParseDuration.
• exclude_subreddits: This key allows you to exclude certain subreddits from retention. No posts or comments in the listed subreddits will be deleted.

The auth command automatically adds entries to the users key as you authenticate them.

Commands

When you run rettention, you must specify one of two commands on the command line.

auth

The auth command launches a web browser to authenticate your reddit account via OAuth. As long as your serve_address and redirect_uri configuration keys are set correctly, continuing through the OAuth flow will generate credentials for your account. After a successful run, this command does two things:

• It adds the credentials for your account to the specified credentials file.
• If your username is not already present in the users key of the configuration file, it adds an entry with default values of "forever" for the retention periods.

run

The run command runs a single round of content deletion. It first fetches the oldest comments and posts for each user specified in the config and then begins deleting content older than the specified retention period for its user and type. It continues running until all expired entries have been deleted. This may take a while for older accounts on the first run as Reddit's rate limits will slow the script down.

Credential Security

Note that rettention will write OAuth credentials in plain text to the file specified in the credential_path configuration key. Anyone with access to this file will be able to read and write reddit content as your user account, so be careful with access to it. Ideally this file should only be accessible to the user account that runs the command.

Disclaimer

The basic purpose of this program is to delete Reddit content. If you make a mistake in the configuration, or if there is a bug in the code, it may delete content you didn't mean to. This program comes with no warranty and its author takes no responsibility for any erroneously deleted data--use at your own risk.