auto-tweeter

Twitter bot designed to tweet things daily for the user with optional SMS updates through Twilio's SMS Messaging API

Initialization

To get the bot started, navigate to the directory you want the project stored, clone the repository, and install the requirements

git clone https://github.com/cskroonenberg/auto-tweeter
cd auto-tweeter
pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Once that's done, you'll need to set up a Twitter profile (if you don't already have one). Feel free to give me a follow if you want ;) .

Then follow the steps at this link to get access to Twitter API keys (make sure these keys grant read and write access. See more here).

If you want to set up SMS updates, you'll need to visit this link. This is optional. The bot will run fine without text updates, but I find it to be a useful feature for tracking when the bot does things.

After you have your API keys, it's almost time to get Tweeting. But first, run the following command:

python3 init_bot.py

This script will ask you a few questions like:

• What is your Twitter username?
• Do you want tweet sounds to play when tweets are sent?
• Do you want SMS updates?

This script will also ask you for your Twitter API keys (and your Twilio API keys and phone number if you chose to set that up). All this information will be all stored in files in the data directory, which is included in the .gitignore file, they are not uploaded anywhere.

Almost done!

Running that script will have created a file called tweets.csv. Edit this file with content for tweets (see below). The bot will Tweet the thing at the top of this file (and then subsequently remove that line from the file after the Tweet has been sent). Make sure you come back to it often to keep adding new tweets to the queue!

#tweets.csv
Throwback Thursday!!!! Can't wait for Thursday Night Football.
It's Friday y'all!!!! #TGIF
Ladies and gentlemen, the weekend

Each of these rows will be used for tweets. The final result should look like this:

One tweet will be tweeted a day. As you can see, the tweet referring to Friday has been Quote Retweeted by the tweet referring to Saturday. (You may also notice that screenshot says 18s on the Quoted Tweet from Friday, this will say 1d when used in production, I just needed to quickly make a screenshot with the sample Tweets I made for this README)

If you opted to receive SMS updates, you will get updates daily:

Execution

So how do you run the program? Using the following command:

python3 bot.py

Will send out a tweet every day at 12:00 PM (based on system time). However! Be aware that the program must be kept running to send tweets out every day. The best method that I have found is to just run that program on a Raspberry Pi or something which can be left running 24/7 (NOTE: whatever device you run the program on must have an internet connection).

Alternatively, you could execute the following command every day, manually:

python3 tweeter.py

Tools

I created the fetch_tweets.py script to fetch your most recent 25 tweets as well as the IDs of your most recent tweets. This can be helpful for development purposes.

python3 fetch_tweets.py

Tweets are logged in a file called log.json. This can be found in the data directory. Tweet content, Tweet ID, Quote Tweet ID, and date-time of tweet are logged.