Twibot¶ ↑

Official URL: github.com/cjohansen/twibot/tree/master Christian Johansen (www.cjohansen.no) Twitter: @cjno

Twibot (pronounced like “Abbot”), is a Ruby microframework for creating Twitter bots, heavily inspired by Sinatra.

require 'twibot'

# Receive messages, and tweet them publicly
#
message do |message, params|
  post_tweet message
end

# Respond to @replies if they come from the right crowd
#
reply :from => [:cjno, :irbno] do |message, params|
  post_tweet "@#{message.sender.screen_name} I agree"
end

# Listen in and log tweets
#
tweet do |message, params|
  MyApp.log_tweet(message)
end

To run the bot, simply do:

ruby bot.rb

Twibot looks for a configuration file in ./config/bot.yml. It should contain atleast:

login: twitter_login
password: twitter_password

You can also pass configuration as command line arguments:

ruby bot.rb --login myaccount

…or configure with Ruby:

configure do |conf|
  conf.login = "my_account"
do

If you don’t specify login and/or password in any of these ways, Twibot will prompt you for those.

If you want to change how Twibot is configured, you can setup the bot instance manually and give it only the configuration options you want:

# Create bot only with default configuration
require 'twibot'
bot = Twibot::Bot.new(Twibot::Config.default)

# Application here...

If you want command line arguments you can do:

require 'twibot'
bot = Twibot::Bot.new(Twibot::Config.default << Twibot::CliConfig.new)

Like Sinatra, and other web app frameworks, Twibot supports “routes”: patterns to match incoming tweets and messages:

require 'twibot'

tweet "time :country :city" do |message,params|
  time = MyTimeService.lookup(params[:country], params[:city])
  client.message :post, "Time is #{time} in #{params[:city]}, #{params[:country]}"
end

You can have several “tweet” blocks (or “message” or “reply”). The first one to match an incoming tweet/message will handle it.

As of the upcoming 0.1.5/0.2.0, Twibot also supports regular expressions as routes:

require 'twibot'

tweet /^time ([^\s]*) ([^\s]*)/ do |message, params|
  # params is an array of matches when using regexp routes
  time = MyTimeService.lookup(params[0], params[1])
  client.message :post, "Time is #{time} in #{params[:city]}, #{params[:country]}"
end

The DSL gives you access to your Twitter client instance through “client” (or “twitter”):

message do
  twitter.status :post, "Hello world" # Also: client.status :post, "Hello world"
end

Twitter4r. You’ll need atleast 0.3.1, which is currently only available from GitHub. Versions of Twitter4r prior to 0.3.1 does not allow for the since_id parameter to be appended to URLs to the REST API. Twibot needs these to only fetch fresh messages and tweets.

gem install twibot

As of Twibot 0.1.3, yes it is! All tests pass, please give feedback from real world usage if you have trouble.

Twitter pulled the plug on it’s xmpp service last year. This means that Twibot backed bots needs to poll the Twitter service to keep up. Twitter has a request limit on 70 reqs/hour, so you should configure your bot not to make more than that, else it will fail. You can ask for your bot account to be put on the whitelist which allows you to make 20.000 reqs/hour, and shouldn’t be a problem so long as your intentions are good (I think).

Twibot polls like this:

• Poll messages if any message handlers exist

• Poll tweets if any tweet or reply handlers exist

• Sleep for interval seconds

• Go over again

As long as Twibot finds any messages and/or tweets, the interval stays the same (min_interval configuration switch). If nothing was found however, the interval to sleep is increased by interval_step configuration option. This happens until it reaches max_interval, where it will stay until Twibot finds anything.

• Dan Van Derveer (bug fixes) - dan.van.derveer.com/

• Ben Vandgrift (Twitter downtime error handling) - neovore.com/

• Jens Ohlig (warnings)

• Wilco van Duinkerken (bug fixes) - www.sparkboxx.com/

• Bodaniel Jeanes (configure block fix) - bjeanes.github.com/

(The MIT License)

Copyright © 2009 Christian Johansen

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the ‘Software’), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED ‘AS IS’, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.