GrailbirdUpdater

For the most of the people who know me online, I've been dying to get a copy of my Twitter archive from Twitter for forever. I was finally given one and decided to write a quick script to keep my own archive up-to-date.

Turns out the contents in the archive are partial/trimmed API responses from the Twitter API, so it is actually possible to drop a whole API response in there, do some sorting and update the archive.

Install it yourself as:

$ gem install grailbird_updater

Or add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'grailbird_updater'

And then execute:

$ bundle

grailbird_updater /path/to/twitter/archive

To run as a cronjob, with the gem installed using rvm (at /home/username/grailbird in this example)

@daily /bin/bash -l -c 'cd /home/username/grailbird && grailbird_updater /path/to/twitter/archive'

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request

• I have a protected Twitter account, can I still use this updater with my Twitter archive?

  Actually, yes! Like with any account, as of v0.5.0, you will need to create your own "application" on Twitter and then use your own consumer key/secret pair to let the application use the oauth tokens for a user and then follow the authorization steps for a given user.

  Once you have auth'd the application for a user, you do not have to do it again, the consumer key/secret and oauth token/secret are stored in a YAML file at the root of your tweet archive (or a user specified locationo, if the --key-path flag is used).

  IMPORTANT Do NOT commit or post your own consumer key/secret or your oauth token/secret anywhere.

  Note: you will only need to create a single application on Twitter even if you are using this to update multiple accounts. You can reuse the consumer key/secret and just authorize each account individually.

  Please see this wiki article for step-by-step instructions.

• How do I know if I have a Twitter archive?

  Hopefully, you downloaded it from Twitter once the feature was made available to you and have their web application which can consume it.

  This gem only modifies what's in the data directory for a given archive, the rest of the files are provided by Twitter.

  To check if you can download a copy of your Twitter archive, go to your Account Settings and scroll all the way to the bottom. If the feature is enabled for you, you should see a section labeled "Your Twitter Archive".

  The file structure looks somewhat like this (as of 09.04.13):

tweets
├── README.txt
├── css
│   └─ application.min.css
├── data
│   └── js
│       ├── payload_details.js
│       ├── tweet_index.js
│       ├── tweets
│       │   ├── 2007_03.js
│       │   ├── 2007_04.js
│       │   ├── 2007_05.js
│       │   ├─ ... // you get the idea, I've been on Twitter a while
│       │   ├── 2013_02.js
│       │   ├── 2013_03.js
│       │   └── 2013_04.js
│       └── user_details.js
├── img
│   └─ ... // provided by Twitter
├── index.html
├── js
│   └─ ... // provided by Twitter
├── lib
│   └─ ... // provided by Twitter
├── README.txt
└── tweets.csv