Inworks Twitter Bot

This repo contains the Python source code for the Inworks Twitter Bot, known affectionately as Inworks Joe. Joe is designed to output selected data from MakerOS' API into Twitter's API to give insight into the featured prototyping and design projects Inworks staff is working on.

Current Functionality

These are the current stable features of Joe (twitter_bot.py).

TWEET CHANGE

• The bot currently works by pulling the "featured" project description and comparing it to a stored string.
• If the strings do not match this means there is a change in the description and we post it as a status.
• The goal is to make this change based on "progress" instead of description changes

AUTO REPLY

• The auto reply feature works currently if someone Tweets regularly while mentioning @Inworks_Joe along with a few keywords.
• Keywords: Hey, hi, hello, joe, yo, sup, whats, support, help. I believe the goal will be to make it reply on any mention period. Note: has bugs
• at the moment the bot sometimes does not reply in a comment but as a status change(Tweet).

Skill-building

This code utilizes a couple of novel concepts that are useful in a programmer's toolkit, namely:

• Using one service's API for data output into another service's API for data input.
• Using the json library to easily parse data into objects.
• Practical application of using a dictionary data structure.
• Industry standard practice for hiding sensitive data (e.g. API keys).

Getting Started

NOTE: This README assumes the user is using a Unix-based Terminal to issue commands to the operating system.

1. Check that git is installed on your machine with git --version.
2. Clone this repository onto your computer with git clone https://github.com/Inworks/twitter-bot.git
3. Check that Python 3 is installed with python3 --version.

If an error message is returned as a result of those commands, then please Google how to install git or Python 3 on your computer.

Dependencies

This project needs a couple of dependencies in order to run. It requires Python 3, the Python package manager pip and the Python virtual environment venv. Documentation for installing and configuring pip and env can be found here.

After dependencies are installed, run this command in the working directory of your bot:

$ python3 -m venv python-env
$ source ./python-env/bin/activate
$ python3 -m pip install --upgrade pip # this ensures you're using the updated version of pip
$ pip install tweepy requests

The steps above are required in order to avoid installing Python packages on our entire machine (i.e. they are installed in project directory only).

Configuration

Credentials and tokens for your own MakerOS API and Twitter API instances need to be added to the init-credentials.sh script and executed in your working directory by using the Terminal command source ./init-credentials.sh. If you plan to work in a public GitHub repo please note that you should rename this file and add its revised name to the .gitignore file. These credentials are stored as environment variables in the OS and then accessed by the twitter_config.py and makeros_functions.py files. For more information about Twitter's access token architecture click here.

For Inworks Employees

Our script for setting environment variables can be accessed on the Inworks file server in the /Space/Downtown Lab/APIs.