GDG Cloud Vancouver TwitterBot-NodeJS

This code is a fork of the main repo here

Yeah it pretty much does what it says in the title. Its a twitter bot which can post tweets, retweet other tweets and possibly fav tweets.

It attempts to retweet once per hour

Installation

• Install Node.js
• Clone this repo

  git clone https://github.com/nisrulz/twitterbot-nodejs.git

• Run

npm install

Connecting to Twitter

• Register a Twitter account and also get its "app info".

Twitter doesn't allow you to register multiple twitter accounts on the same email address. I recommend you create a brand new email address (perhaps using Gmail) for the Twitter account. Once you register the account to that email address, wait for the confirmation email.

• Now go here and log in as the Twitter account for your bot:
• Fill up the form and submit.
• Next once the submission completes you will be taken to a page which has the
  • "Settings" tab : Update details here
  • "Permissons" tab : Enable Read and Write
  • "Key and Access Token" tab : Click on Create my access token.
• Use the generated tokens in the "Key and Access Token" tab to fill the fields under the config.js file in your app directory. It should look like this:

module.exports = {
  consumer_key:         'blah',
  consumer_secret:      'blah',
  access_token:         'blah',
  access_token_secret:  'blah'
}

• Update the code under bot.js , with the your values. Best of all modify the code, tinker with it.
• Now type the following in the command line in your project directory:

node bot.js

Hopefully at this point you see a message like "Success! Check your bot, it should have retweeted something." Ok it won't say that, you have to code that in. Its as simple as

console.log("Success! Check your bot, it should have retweeted something.");

Check the Twitter account for your bot, and it should have retweeted a tweet with the provided hashtag.

Whats Next

You might want to push this app to a running server , probably heroku.

Note : Heroku servers would go back to sleep if there is no activity after some time, so you can have a look at Kaffeine , to keep your server active.

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Do not misuse the twitter api to spam or burden the server load for twitter api , as twitter follows a strict rule of closing down accounts that do that. Please read here for the rules