Let's make a bot!! These instructions are written for participants in the Jumpstart Program.
Required libraries: tweepy 3.5, requests, time, os, random. Written in Python 3.
For this workshop, you will need to follow the Jumpstart Program install-fest instructions to set up Anaconda (which will install Python for you and the required libraries listed above), VSCode, and a Twitter developer account.
Get this code onto your local machine.
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Fork this repository by clicking the button labeled 'fork' in the top right corner of this window.
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Clone the repository to your local machine.
- Copy the repository url from your browser.
- In your terminal [mac] or command line [windows], navigate to the repository where you want this repository to live (your Desktop, for example), and then run the following command to clone the repository to that location:
git clone [repository url]
- Navigate into that repository with the command
cd bot-tutorial-jumpstart
To test things out and get familiar with how we will be running code throughout the workshop, follow these steps:
- Using your finder or search box, find the folder on your desktop. Open the folder and open the file test.py in Visual Studio Code.
- To run the code, click the green triangle in the upper right corner of the VS Code window.
- Look for “Hello, there!” printed in the Terminal part of this window (the lower half).
View an annotated screenshot of how to edit and run Python code in VS Code
Give your Twitter script the passwords it needs to send tweets via code instead of using the Twitter website.
- Go to https://developer.twitter.com/en/apps/ and create an app
- This info isn't public so your app name/description can be messy
- Find the app's
Keys and Access Tokens - (Re)generate "Consumer API keys" and "Access token & access token secret"
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Copy Consumer API Key/Secret and Access Token/Secret to credentials.template
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Save that file as a new file named credentials.py
(Why save with a new filename? Later on, you'll commit and push the changes you make to these files using Git, and those changes will be publicly viewable on your GitHub account. But you don't want to share your bot account's credentials/passwords. The file called .gitignore has credentials.py listed as a file to ignore, so Git will never even see it, and it won't get sent to your GitHub account.)
This script is a basic Twitter bot. It will tweet three things from a list inside the script.
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Go to the bot-tutorial-jumpstart folder. Click on
listbot.pyto see the code -
Take a look at the script; Robin and Tori will talk about what it's doing
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Clicking the green "run" triangle will run the bot. A Terminal will appear at the bottom of the screen with the output
Change it up!
- In
tweet_list, add new things for your bot to tweet - Increase/decrease time between tweets in
time.sleep(15)(15 is the number of seconds)
This script sends out five tweets from the first five lines of an external .txt file
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Go to the bot-tutorial-jumpstart folder. Click on
textbot.py -
Also look at
twain.txtto see the text -
Take a look at both files; Robin and Tori will talk about what the script is doing
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Select
Run
Change it up!
- New text source
- Go to http://gutenberg.org and choose a different text for your bot to tweet. Pick the "Plain Text UTF-8" option when selecting a text format.
- Open a text editor. Copy and paste your gutenberg.org text (or any text of your choosing) into this blank file
- Remove junk at the beginning (and the end) of the file. Save the file as a .txt
- Replace double linebreaks with single linebreaks. If your file is very short you can maybe do this manually. If the file is very long, you can use advanced find/replace
- In textbot.py, replace
twain.txtwith thenewfilename.txt, then go to town
- Make the bot send more or fewer tweets, or change which lines, by editing the numbers in
for line in tweettext[0:5].[0:5]means from the first thing up to (but not including) the #5 thing. Programming languages consider 0 to be the first number, so what we'd call "line one" is actually "line zero" to the computer, and "line six" to humans is "line five" to the computer.
This script treats the poem This Is Just To Say (William Carlos Williams) as a mad-lib, filling in 3 blanks from 3 data sources: JSON files from @dariusk's collection of corpora and word lists.
Change it up!
- Choose different word lists. Make sure to change the URLs in lines
16-19and the list name in lines22-25. - Choose a different piece of text to make into a mad lib.
You've made changes to these scripts since you first forked them. Now you'll practice committing and pushing those changes so you have a record of your versions.
- In the Terminal window of VS Code, type
git statusand hit the return (enter) key to see the files you've changed. - Then type
git add listbot.py(or another filename) and hit return - (Optional) Type
git statusand hit return again to check what that did - Type
git commit -m "Changed what the bot tweets"(or another way to describe your change) and hit return
View an annotated screenshot of how to use Git in VS Code
At some point, you'll want the changes you've committed on your machine to appear on your GitHub repository.
- In the Terminal window again, type
git push origin masterand hit the return key. You should see a message of success.
No message of success? Ask a workshop facilitator what's going on.
Questions about these instructions? Contact Robin at [email protected].
This tutorial and its updated materials were originally put together by Robin Davis (@robincamille) and Mark Eaton (github.com/MarkEEaton) for a pre-conference workshop at Code4Lib 2018.
See original repo: https://github.com/robincamille/bot-tutorial
See also: Davis, Robin, and Mark Eaton. Make a Twitter Bot in Python: Iterative Code Examples. Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy (Blueprints section). April 2016. (Verbose write-up featuring code from a previous version of this workshop.)