Laravel Zero/Dusk- Tracking twitter accounts

I was looking for a small application idea to finally test .I decided to create something to track cryptocurrency Twitter accounts and to detect trends (and offer alerts on this data on ). Laravel Zero Cryptalert So we will create a Laravel Zero application and integrate , a custom version of for Laravel Zero, to easily track the evolution of twitter accounts. /laravel-console-dusk Laravel Dusk 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: : to save the accounts handles we want to track the statistics of twitter_account : to save the account statistics of the twitter_account table twitter_account_data 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 table: twitter_account 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 ( , , and ) @taylorotwell @enunomaduro @martin_riedweg @VitalikButerin line 37: for each handle, we go to the corresponding account page, for example for taylorotwell https://twitter.com/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 The exact value is in the attribute data-count line 50 to 57: we store the data in our table twitter_account_data 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: Console output You can easily automate this command using Cron: https://laravel-zero.com/docs/task-scheduling/ In the code of my GetTwitterData command I have: schedule(Schedule $schedule){$schedule->command( :: )->everyThirtyMinutes();} public function static class 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 🙂