benhigginbottom / twitterbot

TwitterBot

I've been playing around with the Twitter API the past week when this tweet caught my eye

https://twitter.com/HashtagGriswold/status/955217190688567297

From a reporter in the US, and it appealed to my warped sense of humour - so decided to write one.

Pre-requisites

Tested with Python 2.7, so this could be run on a Raspberry Pi

Only external dependency is Tweepy, which assuming pip is installed, can be installed with the following command (Linux)

pip install tweepy --user

All testing has been conducted on Ubuntu Linux, although there isnt anything that would prevent it running on OSX or even Windows

Setup

There are multiple tutorials on how to setup an app in twitter, so I'll just link to one -

https://dototot.com/how-to-write-a-twitter-bot-with-python-and-tweepy/

The application will need to be able to read and write to Twitter

Configuration

With the Consumer and Access keys, the following section of the TwitterBot.py file will need to be updated

CONSUMER_KEY = "CONSUMER_KEY"
CONSUMER_SECRET = "CONSUMER_SECRET"
ACCESS_TOKEN = "ACCESS_TOKEN"
ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET = "ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET"

And then the user you want to quote without the '@' along with the comment you want to make before the quote here

userdispname = "SET ME TO THE USER YOU WANT TO QUOTE"
comment = "SET ME TO THE COMMENT"

So in Mr Griswold's case these would be

userdispname = "neiltyson"
comment = "*Giant Bong Hit*"

Which being the innocent I am, I'm certain is some kind of percussion instrument, like a gong...

Running

python ./TwitterBot.py

The program maintains a state in a textfile in the same directory as the program. This file contains the last ID of the tweet quoted and will only update the status if there is a new tweet.

There isnt a timer or other daemon yet, so the program will either need to be manually run or setup with a crontab

To-do

• Convert into a lambda function
• Add in datetime and stick in a sleep function?