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Squidlr landing page

additional screenshots

X post with multiple video files

What is Squidlr?

Squidlr is a platform to easily download videos and GIFs from various social media and video platforms.

It's composed of a SPA (single page application) website and an API server and is open source software.

Features

  • Download videos from:
    • X (f.k.a Twitter)
    • Instagram
    • TikTok
  • choose between available video file resolutions
  • support of multiple videos found in a single post
  • display of common meta data attached to the post (likes, shares, author, etc.)
  • no ads
  • fast

Motivation

Squidlr was created out of a need for a better user experience. Many existing download services suffer from issues such as excessive advertisements, slow performance, and an overall unsatisfactory user interface. As the creator of Squidlr, I wanted to offer a platform that is free, fast, and provides a superior user experience compared to other services.

Additionally I wanted to use and learn the functionality of Blazor, a SPA library, which is part of the ASP.NET Core Framework from Microsoft.

How do I use Squidlr?

Currently Squidlr is being hosted on the Azure Cloud and can be accessed from any web browser via https://www.squidlr.com/

Build and use locally

If you want to use Squidlr on your local machine you have to download the source code or clone the complete repository with Git:

git clone https://github.com/rgueldenpfennig/Squidlr.git

After that you can open the solution file Squidlr.sln with Visual Studio or another IDE (e.g. JetBrains Rider).

To run both the website and the API you need to make sure to set the APPLICATION__APIKEY environment variable to a value of your choice. Otherwise the web server won't be allowed to communicate with the backend API.

You can also use Docker compose to get both components up and running quite easily. Just execute the command in the root directory:

docker-compose up -d

Either way you can access the frontend by navigating to http://localhost:8091/ after everything is up and running.

Contributing

If you want to contribute you are welcome to create a pull request targeting the dev branch or simply open up an issue.

Deployment and hosting

Both the API backend and the web frontend are uploaded to an Azure Container Registry as Docker images. The dev and main branch builds are then pushed into a Azure Container App which are accessible through the Internet. Both branches have their own environment respectively, where dev is Staging and main is Production.

All the relevant steps are executed by using GitHub actions.

Additionally each environment has a Application Insights instance to collect basic (anonymous) meta data.

Mobile App

I also started to develop a mobile app version of Squidlr based on .NET MAUI. Depending on my free resources I would love to explore that endeavour and publish Squidlr as an app on Android and iOS devices. As the whole logic would be hosted by the client device there won't be any need to communicate with a server but the targeted social media platforms. This means the HTTP request pipeline will be under total control outside of the restriction of modern web browsers. So, it would be possible to directly download TikTok videos for example, instead of using a proxy video streaming server. Additionally it won't be necessary to use a HTTP proxy, which is currently required to crawl Instagram from the backend APIs.