theomantz / nyc_asp_alerts

A Twitter Bot which retweets @NYCASP only when parking is suspended so that users can follow the bot and safely turn on Tweet notifications.

New York City Alternate Side Parking Twitter Bot

Here is -> The Bot

Description:

There is a whole lot of things to keep track of when living in New York. One of them is the various holidays which (fortunately) suspend street sweeping. This project aims to take away at least one concern for street parking drivers in New York.

This project is a simple Twitter bot written in Python which uses the Tweepy package to interact with the Twitter API. The bot then runs twice daily in a Docker container image on an AWS EC2 instance. Each time it runs it pulls all of the recent tweets of the @NYCASP twitter account from the Twitter API, iterates over the recent tweets, and if the tweet was tweeted today, contains the word "suspended", and has not been retweeted by our bot already, the bot will retweet it. This allows Twitter users to follow the bot, turn on tweet notifications and only get alerts for @NYCASP tweets which impact them.

Getting Started:

First things first you will want to clone the project locally.

git clone [e-mail]:theomantz/nyc_asp_alerts.git

Once the project has been cloned cd into the project directory and ensure you have venv set up.

python -m pip install --user virtualenv

Set up the virtual environment.

python -m venv venv

Activate the virtual environment.

. venv/bin/activate

Install dependencies.

pip install -r requirements.txt

At this point you will need a Twitter developer account to continue. Go to https://developer.twitter.com/en/apply-for-access

Once you have a Twitter developer account you will need to populate a .env file in the root of the project directory with the following information.

twitter_api_key=<your_api_key>
twitter_api_secret=<your_api_secret>
twitter_access_token=<your_access_token>
twitter_access_token_secret=<your_access_token_secret>

Once the information is provided in your .env file you can run the bot

python bot.py

If you would like to create a Docker image to run on a server.

docker build . -t nyc_asp_alerts

To test your Docker image build

docker run -it -e twitter_api_key=<your_api_key> \
-e twitter_api_secret=<your_api_secret> \
-e twitter_access_token=<your_access_token> \
-e twitter_access_token_secret=<your_access_token_secret> \
nyc_asp_alerts 

Note: when running a Docker image through a cronjob remove the -it flag as cron is not interactive nor supports TTY

Then you can ssh to a remote server, upload and extract the image, and set it to run with a cronjob or continuously.