Removeddit

Removeddit is a site for viewing removed stuff from Reddit. Just go to a reddit thread and change the reddit in the URL to removeddit to see all removed comments.

This is a done by comparing the comments found from Reddit API and comments being stored in Jason Baumgartners Pushshift Reddit API. The frontend is written in react with redux for state management. There's also a seperate backend used for storing removed threads and banned subreddits.

Development

Get lastest version of Node

sudo git clone https://github.com/JubbeArt/removeddit.git && cd removeddit
npm install
npm start

Visit http://localhost:8080 and make sure the site is running. Subreddits and the banned subreddit list will not work unless you also set up a backend. This might change in the future if I decide to open up my backend on removeddit.com/api. Contact me if you want this feature and we can discuss it.

Production (basic setup)

THIS WILL BE UPDATED LATER WHEN THE PROJECT IN REWRITTEN

Using Ubuntu 16.04 and nginx

cd /srv
sudo git clone https://github.com/JubbeArt/removeddit.git /srv/removeddit/site
chown -R www-data:www-data /srv/removeddit
sudo apt install -y nginx
sudo cp /srv/removeddit/site/production/nginx-basic /etc/nginx/sites-available/default

Create a reddit app here, select installed app. For "redirect url" it doesn't really matter in this case, you can pick http://localhost.

Copy the client ID for your app set it as a variable in id.js, e.g. with

sudo nano /srv/removeddit/site/..../id.js
# Insert with ctrl-shift-v
# Save with ctrl-o, exit with ctrl-x

Restart nginx and visit "localhost"

sudo service nginx restart

The "I care about HTTPS and security" guide

In this part we'll set up nginx with SSL and set up a free renewing SSL certificates with Let's Encrypt. I assume you've already done the guide above.

Nginx.conf

Add the following to /etc/nginx/nginx.conf in the http-block (you can read about them here)

server_tokens off;
add_header X-Frame-Options SAMEORIGIN;
add_header X-Content-Type-Options nosniff;
add_header X-XSS-Protection "1; mode=block";

Nginx server config

Copy the ssl config and create a soft link. Create folder for logs and also remove the default config

sudo cp /srv/removeddit/site/production/nginx-ssl /etc/nginx/sites-available/removeddit.com
sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/removeddit.com /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/removeddit.com
sudo mkdir /var/log/nginx/removeddit
sudo rm /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default

Change the "server_name" for both server blocks in the config to your own domain name.

SSL with Let's encrypt

Read the full guide here. Start of by installing the Let's Encrypt client certbot

sudo apt install -y software-properties-common
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:certbot/certbot
sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y python-certbot-nginx 

Copy the Let's Encrypt config file for our site

sudo mkdir /etc/letsencrypt/configs
cp /srv/removeddit/site/production/letsencrypt.conf /etc/letsencrypt/configs/removeddit.com.conf

In this config file change the domains and the email address for your own. The emails tells you when the certificates are close to expiring.

Pray to God and do this

sudo certbot --config /etc/letsencrypt/configs/removeddit.com.conf certonly

You'll now have a valid SSL certificate (hopefully)! You now have to uncomment the ssl_certificate and ssl_certificate_key in /etc/nginx/sites-available/removeddit.com and maybe change the path depending on where the certs are located (check in /etc/letsencrypt/live/).

Automated renewal of certs

The certificate expires after 90 days so we want a way to atomatically update the certs. There are multiple ways of doing this but I find the easiest to be cron jobs.

First we'll test if renewing atcutally works with

sudo certbot renew --dry-run

If everything works fine we can create a cron with sudo crontab -e and select an editor your comfortable with (I like nano). Add the following lines at the bottom

# Let's Encrypt cert renewal for all sites (runs every day at 04:30)
30 4 * * * certbot renew --post-hook "systemctl reload nginx"

Then just restart nginx and that should do it!

This guide was mostly written for myself, you learn a shitton writing guides, highly recommended. Hopefully you learned something too.