Building a Twitter bot using their is one of the fundamental applications of the Twitter API. To build a Twitter bot with Nodejs, you’ll need to take these steps below before proceeding: API Create a new account for the bot Apply for API access at developer.twitter.com Ensure you have NodeJS and NPM installed on your machine We’ll be building a Twitter bot with Nodejs to track a specific hashtag then like and retweet every post containing that hashtag. Getting up and running Firstly you’ll need to initialize your node app by running npm init and filling the required parameters. Next, we install Twit, an NPM package that makes it easy to interact with the Twitter API. $ npm install twit --save Now, go to your Twitter developer dashboard to create a new app so you can obtain the consumer key, consumer secret, access token key and access token secret. After that, you need to set up these keys as environment variables to use in the app. Building the bot Now in the app’s entry file, initialize Twit with the secret keys from your Twitter app. Twit = ( ); T = Twit({ : process.env.APPLICATION_CONSUMER_KEY_HERE, : process.env.APPLICATION_CONSUMER_SECRET_HERE, : process.env.ACCESS_TOKEN_HERE, : process.env.ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET_HERE }); // index.js const require 'twit' const new consumer_key consumer_secret access_token access_token_secret Listening for events Twitter’s gives access to two streams, the and the , we’ll be using the public stream which is a stream of all public tweets, you can read more on them in the documentation. streaming API user stream public stream We’re going to be tracking a keyword from the stream of public tweets, so the bot is going to track tweets that contain “#JavaScript” (not case sensitive). Twit = ( ); T = Twit({ : process.env.APPLICATION_CONSUMER_KEY_HERE, : process.env.APPLICATION_CONSUMER_SECRET_HERE, : process.env.ACCESS_TOKEN_HERE, : process.env.ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET_HERE }); stream = T.stream( , { : }); stream.on( , tweet => { }); // index.js const require 'twit' const new consumer_key consumer_secret access_token access_token_secret // start stream and track tweets const 'statuses/filter' track '#JavaScript' // event handler 'tweet' // perform some action here Responding to events Now that we’ve been able to track keywords, we can now perform some magic with tweets that contain such keywords in our event handler function. The Twitter API allows interacting with the platform as you would normally, you can create new tweets, like, retweet, reply, follow, delete and more. We’re going to be using only two functionalities which is the like and retweet. Twit = ( ); T = Twit({ : APPLICATION_CONSUMER_KEY_HERE, : APPLICATION_CONSUMER_SECRET_HERE, : ACCESS_TOKEN_HERE, : ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET_HERE }); stream = T.stream( , { : }); { .log(err); } stream.on( , tweet => { T.post( , { : tweet.id_str}, responseCallback); T.post( , { : tweet.id_str}, responseCallback); }); // index.js const require 'twit' const new consumer_key consumer_secret access_token access_token_secret // start stream and track tweets const 'statuses/filter' track '#JavaScript' // use this to log errors from requests ( ) function responseCallback err, data, response console // event handler 'tweet' // retweet 'statuses/retweet/:id' id // like 'favorites/create' id Retweet To retweet, we simply post to the statuses/retweet/:id also passing in an object which contains the id of the tweet, the third argument is a callback function that gets called after a response is sent, though optional, it is still a good idea to get notified when an error comes in. Like To like a tweet, we send a post request to the favourites/create endpoint, also passing in the object with the id and an optional callback function. Deployment Now the bot is ready to be deployed, I use Heroku to deploy node apps so I’ll give a brief walkthrough below. Firstly, you need to download the Heroku CLI tool, here’s the . The tool requires git in order to deploy, there are other ways but deployment from git seems easier, here’s the . documentation documentation There’s a feature in Heroku where your app goes to sleep after some time of inactivity, this may be seen as a bug to some persons, . see the fix here You can read more on the Twitter documentation to build larger apps, It has every information you need to know about. Here is the source code in case you might be interested.
