🕷️ Social Spiders

Widespread adoption of social media among the younger generation has created an environment where users share a large amount of their life online.

This often leads users to inadvertently share personal data that can be used by threat actors for nefarious means, such as financial fraud.

Social Spiders is an accessible web application that uses social media APIs to gather a users posts, and a NLP model to demonstrate where this data has been included in the users posts.

Frontend Development

We started the frontend dev cycle by making a prototype of the website on figma: link

Backend Setup Instructions

1️⃣ Linux

To set up Social Spiders on Linux:

1. Install apache2 , PHP 8.1 and all other web dependencies.
2. Run:

   sudo apt find / -name "libphp*"

3. Move the libphpX.X.so file to usr/lib/apache2/modules/
4. Edit httpd.conf by adding:

   <FilesMatch \.php$>
       SetHandler application/x-http-php
   </FilesMatch>

5. Restart apache (in the terminal run services restart httpd)
6. From the project root, install PHP dependencies with composer install
7. Deploy the app files and Composer vendor/ directory into /var/www/html/
8. Navigate to http://127.0.0.1/ to confirm the web server is running and serving the correct services

2️⃣ macOS

To set up Social Spiders on macOS using Homebrew (open your mac terminal or the VSCode built in terminal):

1. Install Homebrew (if not installed):

   /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

2. Install Apache httpd and PHP 8.1:

   brew install httpd php@8.1

3. Start the services:

   brew services start httpd
   brew services start php@8.1

4. Configure Apache for PHP:

   • STEP 1: In your mac terminal run nano /opt/homebrew/etc/httpd/httpd.conf. This will open httpd.conf and allow you to edit it.

   • STEP 2: Use ctrl+W to search for LoadModule. Make sure the following are enabled by removing the # which is commenting them out:

     • LoadModule proxy_module lib/httpd/modules/mod_proxy.so
     • LoadModule proxy_fcgi_module lib/httpd/modules/mod_proxy_fcgi.so

   • STEP 3: Right after the last LoadModule line add the following:

     <FilesMatch \.php$>
         SetHandler "proxy:fcgi://127.0.0.1:9000"
     </FilesMatch>

   • STEP 4: Restart apache with command brew services restart httpd

5. After saving, test the config:

   httpd -t

6. From the project root, install PHP dependencies:

   composer install

   Or

   composer update

7. Deploy the app files and Composer vendor/ directory to DocumentRoot:

   cp -r src/* /opt/homebrew/var/www/
   cp -r vendor /opt/homebrew/var/www/

8. Test the setup by either:

   • Opening the browser on http://127.0.0.1:8080/
   • Create info.php in DocumentRoot with <?php phpinfo(); ?> and visit it to verify PHP is running the server

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❌ macOS Troubleshooting

If you get this error:

Bootstrap failed: 5: Input/output error
Try re-running the command as root for richer errors.

Make sure you are not already running httpd, try any of the following:

1. Stop and restart:

brew services stop httpd
brew services stop --all
brew services run httpd
brew services restart httpd

2. Clean files:

rm -f /opt/homebrew/var/run/httpd*.pid

---

Dependencies

• pip install gliner

Web dependencies:

• httpd (apache2)
• php >=8.1
• php-curl (included in php@8.1)
• libapache2-mod-php

API dependencies:

• Abraham/TwitterOAuth
• Espresso-dev/instagram-basic-display-php
• viktorruskai/facebook-graph-sdk

Create venv for Python dependencies:

$ python3 -m venv venv
$ pip install gliner transformers

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Original git env: link