Laravel Zero/Dusk- Tracking twitter accounts

Originally published by Martin Riedweg on January 5th 2019 1,934 reads

@martin_riedwegMartin Riedweg

I was looking for a small application idea to finally test Laravel Zero.
I decided to create something to track cryptocurrency Twitter accounts and to detect trends (and offer alerts on this data on Cryptalert).

So we will create a Laravel Zero application and integrate /laravel-console-dusk, a custom version of Laravel Dusk for Laravel Zero, to easily track the evolution of twitter accounts.

What is Laravel Zero ?

Laravel Zero was created by, and is maintained by Nuno Maduro, and is a micro-framework that provides an elegant starting point for your console application. It is an unofficial and customized version of Laravel optimized for building command-line applications.

What is Laravel Dusk ?

Laravel Dusk is a powerful browser automation tool for Laravel. With Dusk you can programmatically test your own applications or visit any website on the internet using a Chrome browser. Dusk can help you to automate repetitive tasks or scrape information from other websites for example.

NB : I discovered the work of Nuno during a meetup at Algolia in November 2018, he did an incredible job for the Laravel community, follow him here: https://twitter.com/enunomaduro

Installation of Laravel Zero and Dusk

Let’s start by installing Laravel Zero by following the documentation: https://laravel-zero.com/docs/installation/

composer create-project — prefer-dist laravel-zero/laravel-zero laravel-zero-dusk

Then install Laravel Dusk:

cd laravel-zero-dusk

php laravel-zero-dusk app:install console-dusk

We will store our data in a database, in Laravel Zero the Laravel’s Eloquent component is an add-on. We can install it like that:

php laravel-zero-dusk app:install database

Remember to change the credentials of your database in the config/database.php file.

Preparation of the database

We will create 2 tables to store our data:

• twitter_account: to save the accounts handles we want to track the statistics of
• twitter_account_data: to save the account statistics of the twitter_account table

So we create 2 migrations:

php laravel-zero-dusk make:migration twitter_account_table

With this content:

And:

php laravel-zero-dusk make:migration twitter_account_data_table

With this content:

We then create a Seeder to add the first accounts in the twitter_account table:

php laravel-zero-dusk make:seeder TwitterAccountSeeder

With this content:

We run our seeder:

php laravel-zero-dusk db:seed --class=TwitterAccountSeeder

Here we just add 4 twitter handles in our twitter_account table. You can do this with basic SQL requests or https://github.com/intonate/tinker-zero (a bridge that allows using laravel/tinker in Laravel Zero applications).

Creation of the command that will store twitter metrics in database

Commands in Laravel Zero are explained here: https://laravel-zero.com/docs/commands/

It’s very similar to the commands of Laravel: https://laravel.com/docs/5.7/artisan#writing-commands

Create a new command named GetTwitterData:

php laravel-zero-dusk make:command GetTwitterData

Here is the code of the command (See details below):

So what are we doing here?

• line 35: we are just getting every handles stored in the twitter_account table, if you create and run the same Seeder as me, you should get 4 handles (@taylorotwell, @enunomaduro, @martin_riedweg and @VitalikButerin)
• line 37: for each handle, we go to the corresponding account page, for example https://twitter.com/taylorotwell for taylorotwell
• line 44 and 47: we retrieve the number of followers and following with CSS selectors: https://laravel.com/docs/master/dusk#interacting-with-elements

• line 50 to 57: we store the data in our twitter_account_data table

We just have to test our command:

php laravel-zero-dusk insert:twitter_data

If all goes well you should see this in your console:

You can easily automate this command using Cron: https://laravel-zero.com/docs/task-scheduling/

In the code of my GetTwitterData command I have:

public function schedule(Schedule $schedule)
{
     $schedule->command(static::class)->everyThirtyMinutes();
}

So my command will run every 30 minutes ✌🏻

The code is available here: https://github.com/MartinRdw/laravel-zero-dusk

Feel free to ask me your questions/bug reports in the comment section 🙂

Related

Earn Crypto Rewards Monthly

Visit Mysterium Network https://bit.ly/2Nz0MX5

promoted

Why Laravel Is a Great Choice For MVP

4 reactions

#laravel

@lukapgLuka Abazovic

02/25/21

Validate Your PHP API Tests Against OpenAPI Definitions – A Laravel...

1 reaction

#openapi

@osteelYannick Chenot

11/20/20