← Back to apps
Sherlock Web App icon

web_app

Sherlock Web App

Sherlock is a great OSINT tool: give it a username and it finds accounts with that name across hundreds of platforms. But it's a command line program, and the people I wanted to share it with were never going to install…

Sherlock is a great OSINT tool: give it a username and it finds accounts with that name across hundreds of platforms. But it's a command line program, and the people I wanted to share it with were never going to install Python and run a terminal command.

The goal was accessibility, not new features. I wrapped Sherlock in a Flask web app: type a username in a box, results appear on the right. Deployed it to Heroku so it was a link anyone could open.

The main design tension was that a Sherlock scan is slow, since it queries hundreds of sites. Running that inside a web request is fine for a personal demo on a single dyno, but it's the first thing I'd change at any scale: move scans to a background queue and stream results in as they arrive. For what this needed to be, a usable front door to a CLI tool, the straightforward version was the right call.