localgoo

Script to replace calls to external google apis (fonts and javascript) on your website with a local copy.

Copyright 2014 Jason Campbell, [email protected] License: GPL v2

Purpose

I wrote this script for a site running wordpress with various themes and plugins that all want your browser to download fonts and javascript from googleapis.com. This resulted in cross-origin exceptions and https/ssl/tls warnings in firefox, safari, iceweasel, and probably other browsers.

This is also a privacy risk, as anytime someone visited the site, google knew about it even though I'm not using analytics. For the sake of my users' privacy, I decided to replace all these cross-site calls with references to a locally-hosted copy of the same files. This script uses wget to download the scripts and fonts, and uses sed to edit a website's files to reference the local copies. This is a good place for the first warning.

WARNING:

1. This script WILL modify your files. Backup everything first and know what you're doing. This could break your website.

2. MAKE YOUR OWN BACKUP FIRST! The automatic backup might fail if you don't have the required permissions.

3. GIT IS REQUIRED FOR THE AUTOMATIC BACKUP TO WORK. This script will initialize a git repo in your www directory and add a commit to it any time you make changes to files. If your site is already in a git repo, this will add commits.

Use at your own risk.

Server Configuration

Sample configuration blocks are included for apache2 and nginx. Adjust these config file as neccessary or create your own. The important thing is that whatever you feed the script for "yourwebsite.com" should have a directory or alias called /localgoo/ that points to the local copy of ajax scripts and fonts, which by default are placed in localgoo/public_html. In other words, you need tobe able to access your local mirror of the downloaded google apis at https://yourwebsite.com/localgoo/

Known Issues

Because some scripts cleverly construct urls to the google apis on use rather than hard coding them into css, html, and javascript files, this script may not be able to determine all the fonts that you need. As a workaround, the script also downloads any files listed in extrafonts.list. The format is just everything you normally put after 'https://fonts.googleapis.com/?family=' A few common fonts are included in the file as examples.

Installation Example

This is only one of many ways:

cd /var/www
git clone https://github.com/dochin/localgoo.git
cd localgoo

#Apache
cp /var/www/localgoo/apache-localgoo.conf /etc/apache2/conf.d/ #default on debian
/etc/init.d/apache2 reload

#Nginx
cp nginx-localgoo.conf /etc/nginx/localgoo.conf
#Then edit your virtual host file to add 'include localgoo.conf;' in the
#appropriate server block.

Usage

#Usage: ./localgoo.sh init|update|download|danger [/path/to/website] [yourwebsite.com]

#Example
./localgoo.sh init /var/www/example.com/public_html example.com
./localgoo.sh download

#WARNING: This is the command that could break your website files will be modified
./localgoo.sh danger

#After you install some new plugins and other crap that reference gapis
./localgoo.sh update
./localgoo.sh download
./localgoo.sh danger

Troubleshooting

Using Firefox, open up the inspector toolbar and choose network. Browse around a few pages and see if there are any 404 errors for missing fonts. If there are, add the referer urls to extrafonts.list.

If you get errors when running the script, check your permissions or run as root (e.g. sudo ./localgoo...).