plcnk / TwitterFlightBot

(ARCHIVED) A Twitter bot that tells you information about a flight by it's number or callsign.

(ARCHIVED) Twitter Flight Bot

This bot will return information about a flight when you tag it with its flight number or its callsign. To use it, you need to tag it by its Twitter handle @FlightStatusBot and follow with a flight number / callsign like so: .@FlightStatusBot U2189.

The bot will reply to you with the following information:

• The airline name with the flight number / callsign
• The origin airport name
• The actual departure time in UTC timezone
• The arrival airport name
• The Estimated Time of Arrival in UTC timezone
• The altitude in feet

Note - Be aware that the flight must be active for the bot to work, meaning the plane's transponder must be on.

The code is written in Python and uses Tweepy for the Twitter connection and FlightRadarAPI for the Flghtradar24 API. This bot is not affiliated with Flightradar24 in any way.

Setup

To run the code yourself, you will need to create an App on the Twitter Developer Portal and generated your tokens to be able to use the API.

After that, there are multiple methods to run this bot.

First method: Use the Docker image (recommended)

A Docker image is available for this project, which makes it easier for production environment and is the method I would recommend. You will first need to have Docker and Docker Compose installed on your machine for this to work.

First, cd into this repository:

cd ./TwitterFlightBot

Then, edit the docker-compose.yml file with your Twitter API credentials:

environment:
    TWITTER_API_KEY: "XXXXX"
    TWITTER_API_KEY_SECRET: "XXXXX"
    TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN: "XXXXX"
    TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET: "XXXXX"
    TWITTER_BEARER_TOKEN: "XXXXX"

Finally, start the bot using this command:

docker compose up -d

If you want to stop the bot, use this command:

docker compose down

Second method: Directly run the code

You can directly run the code on your machine or your VM. You will need to have Python3 installed, which comes by default on most Linux distros.

If you don't have it, install pip:

sudo apt install python3-pip

First, cd into this repository:

cd ./TwitterFlightBot

I recommend using a virtual environment to run the code, you can find out how to use this here. It is not required, but I highly recommend virtualenvs to avoid breaking your main environment.

After that, install the required packages with this command:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Next, you will need to export your Twitter API credentials as environment variables:

export TWITTER_API_KEY="XXXXX"
export TWITTER_API_KEY_SECRET="XXXXX"
export TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN="XXXXX"
export TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET="XXXXX"
export TWITTER_BEARER_TOKEN="XXXXX"

Finally, start the bot with python main.py.

License

This project is licensed under MIT License. See LICENSE for more details.