Adds LAST30DAYS_YT_SSH_HOST env var (or `~/.config/last30days/.env` key).
When set, yt-dlp YouTube search invocations are wrapped as
`ssh <host> "yt-dlp ..."` so they run on a residential-IP machine.
Motivation: when last30days runs on a datacenter VPS (Hetzner,
DigitalOcean, AWS, etc.), `ytsearch:` queries return 0 results because
YouTube's bot-wall fingerprints datacenter IP ranges before any cookie
check runs. Cookies alone don't fix this — the IP reputation is checked
first. Verified across yt-dlp stable 2026.03.17 and nightly builds.
The existing fallbacks (browser cookies, residential proxy services,
excluding YouTube) all have downsides: cookies expire, proxies cost
money, exclusion loses signal. Many users with a Mac mini, Pi, or
home server can host yt-dlp on their own residential IP — this just
needs an SSH alias and a one-line env var to wire it up.
Behaviour:
- Default (env var unset): identical to before, no shape change.
- Env var set: search command list is wrapped with `ssh -o BatchMode=yes
<host> "<shell-quoted yt-dlp invocation>"`. is_ytdlp_installed()
returns True without a local PATH check (the binary lives on the
remote host).
- Transcript path: when SSH-routing is on, skips the yt-dlp transcript
path (which writes a VTT file we couldn't easily read back over SSH)
and uses the existing _fetch_transcript_direct HTTP fallback. The
timedtext API isn't bot-walled, so this works fine on datacenter IPs.
Setup pitfall documented in the function docstring: on macOS hosts
with Homebrew, `eval "$(/opt/homebrew/bin/brew shellenv zsh)"` must
live in ~/.zshenv (not just ~/.zprofile) — non-login SSH shells don't
source .zprofile, so without this `ssh macmini "yt-dlp ..."` returns
"command not found" while interactive SSH works fine.
Tests: 10 new cases covering env var read, whitespace stripping,
empty-value handling, command wrapping passthrough/active modes,
shlex quoting, is_ytdlp_installed short-circuit, and end-to-end
search_youtube wrapping. Full test suite: 0 new failures (the 14
pre-existing failures in test_store, test_watchlist, test_setup_openclaw,
test_safari_cookies, test_version_consistency are unchanged on main).
Verified live: 0 results → 4 real hits for "claude code" search from a
Hetzner VPS routed through a Mac mini exit node on Tailscale.
Two related fixes that surface when running last30days with multi-keyword
themed queries (e.g. "claude, personal agents, agentic infra"). Both bugs
caused entire sources to silently return zero items.
YouTube (ScrapeCreators)
SC's /v1/youtube/search rejects ?keyword= with HTTP 400:
{"error":"missing_parameter","message":"You must provide a query"}
The canonical SC parameter for that endpoint is `query`. Other SC
endpoints we use (Reddit, TikTok, Instagram) happened to work because
they use their own per-endpoint parameter names — YouTube was the lone
outlier.
Hacker News (Algolia)
Multi-keyword theme queries returned zero hits across every theme.
Algolia treats query= as strict AND across tokens, so a 4-5 word query
like "claude, personal agents, agentic infra" matches no stories.
Three changes in hackernews.py:
1. Hoist comma/hyphen flattening into _flatten_query_for_algolia() so
search_hackernews and _title_matches_query normalize the query the
same way — addresses Greptile P2 #2 about the two callsites needing
to stay in sync.
2. Pass `optionalWords` for all-but-the-first token so Algolia ranks
by token-overlap instead of requiring every token.
3. Relax _title_matches_query from all-words to any-word, *but match
on word boundaries (\b<word>\b) rather than naive substring* —
addresses Greptile P2 #1, which flagged that the previous any-word
relaxation would let "ai" falsely match "email" or "rail".
Token-overlap relevance scoring at parse time already demotes weak
matches, so word-boundary any-word matching is safe.
Tests: added coverage for no-token-in-title rejection, word-boundary vs
substring, and hyphen/comma flattening alignment between the search
parameter and the post-filter.
Co-authored-by: Trevin Chow <trevin@trevinchow.com>
Five provider modules (pinterest, threads, instagram, tiktok, youtube_yt)
and watchlist.py each carried a try/except `requests` import with parallel
urllib + requests branches. The urllib path already used the
stdlib-only wrapper at `lib/http.py` (retries, 429 handling, HTTPError).
This collapses every dual-branch into a single `http.get`/`http.post`
call and removes the `requests` dependency from `pyproject.toml`.
Also drops 4 transitive deps (urllib3, certifi, charset-normalizer, idna)
from the lockfile, leaving the skill stdlib-only at runtime.
Tests for tiktok comments and watchlist delivery were rewritten to mock
`lib.http` directly instead of the now-removed `requests` module.
Out of scope but flagged during review: the 13 surviving SC call sites
share a near-identical scaffold and would benefit from a
`http.scrapecreators_get(url, params, token, ...)` helper. Filed for a
follow-up PR rather than expanding scope here.
bird_x.py and youtube_yt.py had four near-identical copies of the same
subprocess cleanup dance (Popen + os.setsid + communicate(timeout) +
SIGTERM via killpg + proc.kill() fallback + wait(5)). Extract to
lib.subproc.run_with_timeout(), which:
- runs the child in its own process group via os.setsid where available
- raises SubprocTimeout on timeout
- on timeout: SIGTERM the group, fall back to proc.kill(), wait up to 5s
- accepts an on_pid callback so bird_x can still register child PIDs
with last30days.register_child_pid for whole-process cleanup
- captures stdout/stderr as strings in a SubprocResult dataclass
Migrated call sites: _run_bird_search, search_handles inner worker,
search_youtube, fetch_transcript. With the helper in place, the signal
and subprocess imports became dead in both files (plus os in
youtube_yt) and went with them.
Tests: 9 new subproc tests cover success, non-zero exit, stderr capture,
timeout-raises, timeout-kills-group, missing-command, env passthrough,
PID callback, and callback-exception suppression. test_env_v3 and
test_youtube_yt patch subproc.run_with_timeout instead of the removed
bird_x.subprocess and yt-dlp subprocess.
shoobee