twitterer

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

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.

  $ gem install tc-twitterer

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

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"

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"

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

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",
]

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",
]

$ 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.

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

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.