Erase All Posts Tumblr Blog

A couple days ago I started thinking of revitalizing my Tumblr blog into something other than a link sharing farm. But if I was going to do this I wanted to get rid of all of that content first. Tumblr provides a “mass editor” but you have to check each item manually and if you have several thousand entries this isn’t feasible in a short amount of time. I also have two other Tumblr blogs, but this is main one. So I can’t delete it altogether without deleting my other blogs. I searched the interwebs to see if someone had written up something already, but to be honest I couldn’t find anything that actually worked.

I found some python libraries to simplify the task though. The main two worth mentioning that you’ll need are oauth2 and pyblr. After installing these, I then registered for an API key. Don’t think too hard about it. Most fields aren’t required when you’re registering an application. Make sure you request xAuth to be enabled because this is a “desktop application”. Then you can check out my python script I wrote to do the dirty work. Easy peasy! Enjoy your freshly cleaned Tumblr blog.

Here’s the python code:

import pyblr
import oauth2 as oauth
import urllib
import urlparse
import time

'''
!WITH PROPER CREDENTIALS THIS WILL ERASE ALL POSTS FROM THE GIVEN TUMBLR BLOG!

Use with caution and make sure you know what you're doing. That said this is 
probably the easiest way to delete all of your posts if you have thousands of 
posts. If you have less than that it might be easier for you to just use the 
mass editor in the Tumblr UI.

This requires you to get an API key from Tumblr and request xAuth access to 
be enabled.
'''
consumer_key = "YOUR_CONSUMER_KEY"
secret_key = "YOUR_SECRET_KEY"
username = "YOUR_EMAIL"
password = "YOUR_PASSWORD"
blog_name = "YOUR_BLOG.tumblr.com"

xauth_access_token_url = "https://www.tumblr.com/oauth/access_token"
request_token_url = "http://www.tumblr.com/oauth/request_token"
authorize_url = "http://www.tumblr.com/oauth/authorize"
access_token_url = "http://www.tumblr.com/oauth/access_token"

consumer = oauth.Consumer(consumer_key,secret_key)
client = oauth.Client(consumer)
client.add_credentials(username,password)
client.authorizations
params = {}
params["x_auth_username"] = username
params["x_auth_password"] = password
params["x_auth_mode"] = 'client_auth'

client.set_signature_method = oauth.SignatureMethod_HMAC_SHA1()
resp, content = client.request(xauth_access_token_url, method="POST", body=urllib.urlencode(params))
if resp['status'] != '200':
    raise Exception("Invalid response %s. => %s" % (resp['status'], content))

token_dict = dict(urlparse.parse_qsl(content))
access_token = oauth.Token(token_dict["oauth_token"], token_dict["oauth_token_secret"])

pyblr_client = pyblr.Pyblr(oauth.Client(consumer, access_token))
counter = 0
while True:
    try:
        posts = pyblr_client.posts(blog_name)
        if len(posts) == 0: break
        for p in posts["posts"]:
            pyblr_client.delete_post(blog_name, params={ "id" : p["id"] })
            counter += 1
    except ValueError, err:
        print "ERROR: %s" % (str(err))
        print "sleeping for 5 seconds before retrying"
        time.sleep(5)

print "Finished clearing blog: %s" % (blog_name)
print "Deleted %d posts" % (counter)

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