twitterer

Program for tweeting random lines from files hosted on a public GitHub repo.

Purpose

I wanted an easy way to drip-feed my Miscellany files into the ether, so wrote twitterer to do just that.

Essentially you feed it paths to publicly accessible files on GitHub and it'll tweet a random line from them (one tweet per file) with a link to the line on GitHub. Optionally it can keep track of previous tweets to avoid sounding repetitive.

Note: source files must be in the default branch, but twitterer will resolve that branch to a commit before tweeting the link.

Installation

  $ gem install tc-twitterer

Configuration

twitterer requires a configuration file to operate. An example is available on GitHub, or you can follow the guide below.

Twitter Consumer API key and secret

First you need to register a new application with Twitter.

Visit https://apps.twitter.com/app/new and follow the steps.

Once you've created the app, hit Keys and Access Tokens to get your... Keys and access tokens.

Config entries:

twitter_consumer_key    = "012a3AbcBdefg4ChiDjklEmnF"
twitter_consumer_secret = "AaBCDEbFGcdHefIgJKhi0jLk1MNOlm2nPQoRS3pTqU4rsVtWuv"

Twitter User API key and secret

On the Keys and Access Tokens page for your app, scroll down to Your Access Token and hit Create my access token to create your access token.

Config entries:

twitter_access_token        = "012345678901234567-abAcBdeCDfEghFi0GHIJKjk9l1Lmnop"
twitter_access_token_secret = "a0AbcB1C2dDEFeGH7If3ghJK4Li15j678kMNlO9PQRmno"

History file

Twitterer can track its past tweets if you tell it where to store them, which prevents it from repeating itself.

Config entry:

history_file = "/path/to/file"

Note: twitterer will create the file, but it won't create any directories.

Note 2: history is stored in a CSV in the following format, which lets it double as a log.

timestamp,source,line

Sources

Finally you need to specify the locations of the files you want to tweet from.

The following conditions apply:

Must be hosted on GitHub
Must be publicly accessible
Must be in the default branch

Paths are specified in the following format: username/repo/path/to/file.txt

Config entry:

source = [
  "tomonocle/tc-twitterer/README.md",
  "tomonocle/trello-list2card/README.md",
]

Final config file

twitter_consumer_key    = "012a3AbcBdefg4ChiDjklEmnF"
twitter_consumer_secret = "AaBCDEbFGcdHefIgJKhi0jLk1MNOlm2nPQoRS3pTqU4rsVtWuv"

twitter_access_token        = "012345678901234567-abAcBdeCDfEghFi0GHIJKjk9l1Lmnop"
twitter_access_token_secret = "a0AbcB1C2dDEFeGH7If3ghJK4Li15j678kMNlO9PQRmno"

history_file = "./var/twitterer.history"

source = [
  "tomonocle/tc-twitterer/README.md",
  "tomonocle/trello-list2card/README.md",
]

Usage

$ twitterer -c config.toml

This will pull down each file in the source list, pick a suitable line then tweet it in the following format:

<first N characters of line> <url>

Where N is defined as the maximum tweet length (which will forever be 140 chars) minus the maximum URL length from t.co (23 as of December 2017). 140-23 = 117

Log output goes to STDERR.

Logging

Log level can be adjusted with -l [debug,info,warn,error,fatal] (defaults to warn).

Dry-run

Dry-run (read-only, don't tweet) can be enabled with -d. Note: you'll probably want to increase the log level with -l for this to be useful.

Exit codes

Code	Meaning
0	Success (wrote output, or nothing to do)
1	Failure. Something went wrong. Always accompanied by a FATAL log message.

tomonocle / tc-twitterer