RTBot is a simple way to make a Twitter retweeting bot.

You just call the ‘rtbot’ script and pass it the path to a YAML file with the configuration for the bot. It does a Twitter search and retweets anything that matches.

After I wrote a script to do this the second time, I decided to make the third time much easier.

See config.yml.example for details on the configuration file.

Command:

rtbot --config=/home/john/bots/scotfail.yml

The process doesn’t daemonise itself - it’s intended to be called repeatedly from cron.

scotfail.yml:

consumer_key: 'actualconsumerkey' # consumer key from your Twitter app
consumer_secret: 'actualconsumersecret' # consumer secret from your Twitter app
access_token: 'actualaccesstoken' # access token from your Twitter app
access_token_secret: 'actualaccesstokensecret' # access token secret from your Twitter app
bot_name: 'scotfail' # Username of Twitter bot - used to prevent self-retweeting.
search_query: '#scotfail' # The Twitter search term

Copyright © 2010 John Daniels. See LICENSE for details.