How to install birdwatcher in kali linux

Birdwatcher is an OSINT data analysis and data gathering tool for twitter.
Birdwatcher has been designed to feel like metasploit or recon-ng, so should be familiar for anyone who has used those tools.

Install birdwatcher in kali linux:

Kali has ruby 2.2.x. by default. Birdwatcher requires ruby > 1.9.3, so there is nothing special to install for this step. The install instructions for birdwatcher recommend to update your ruby gems, in my experience this breaks kali, so I didnt do this step. If you are feeling brave, you can “gem update –system” if not, you can skip onto creating a database.

You need to start postgres and add a database user. In kali you need to sudo to the postgres user to create databases and users.



sudo -u postgres createuser -s birdwatcher --pwprompt
sudo -u postgres createdb -O birdwatcher birdwatcher



Next, we install graphviz for some of the cool output graphics:



apt-get install graphviz



We will also need an imagemagick dev package (and its dependencies) along with some postgesql server development libraries. If we don’t have these installed the gem step will fail:



apt-get install libmagickwand-dev
apt-get install postgresql-server-dev-9.6



and finally, we can install birdwatcher using gem:



gem install birdwatcher



This takes a while (not as long as compiling X from source on a 586, but still – you might want to go for a coffee)

You’ll now be able to follow the tutorial here and grab some data and play with it :)