Building a simple Twitter bot with the Twitter Ruby gem

Twitter-gem.md

Twitter gem overview

Adapted (formatting changes) from https://gist.github.com/mbd-s/2352b1454790852a6946dcb3842ec3d5

The Twitter Ruby gem is a Ruby interface to the Twitter API. It allows you to make all available Twitter API requests (e.g., tweet, follow a user, search, etc.) within a Rails app.

This guide was adapted from multiple sources, including the Twitter Ruby gem configuration page and How to Make a Twitter Bot in Ruby on Rails. Twitter's own API docs are a good resource too, of course.

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Get set up with Twitter

To begin, you'll need to register your application with Twitter and get the proper keys. Log into or sign up for a Twitter account, and scroll down to "Manage Your Apps." Click "Create a New App" and fill out the form with the app's details. Once you're on the app's management page, select the "Permissions" tab. Make sure access is set to "Read and Write." Finally, navigate to the "Keys and Access Tokens" tab. Note your "Consumer Key" and "Consumer Key Secret" tokens, and initialize the app's Access Tokens ("Access Token" and "Access Token Secret"). Keep these four keys for later.

Configure your bot in Rails

Create a new Rails app. Add gem 'twitter', '~> 5.16' and figaro to your Gemfile. Run bundle install and figaro install. The latter command creates a new file called application.yml that you'll use to store your secret access keys. It also adds the file to .gitignore.

Add your four keys to application.yml, making sure to update the values with your actual keys:

consumer_key: "Your access code here" consumer_secret: "Your access code here" access_token: "Your access code here" access_secret: "Your access code here"

To configure the bot, touch twitter.rb file in /config/initializers. Paste the following code:

CLIENT = Twitter::REST::Client.new do |config|
  config.consumer_key = ENV['consumer_key']
  config.consumer_secret = ENV['consumer_secret']
  config.access_token = ENV['access_token']
  config.access_token_secret = ENV['access_secret']
end

Test the configuration by running ENV['consumer_key'] in the command line. You should get back your consumer key.

If if everything's working, generate a new Bot model in Rails (and run rake db:migrate). Here you'll write the methods that you'll use to access Twitter. To search for the latest tweet that contains a certain string, for example, you'll want something like:

def self.search_words words 
  CLIENT.search(words, lang: "en").first.text 
end

Start tweeting

Test it out in the Rails console by running Bot.search_words 'baby goats'. You should see the text of a recent tweet that contains the string "baby goats."

A few other methods you can try:

#tweet
def self.tweet status 
  CLIENT.update(status)
end

#follow another user
def self.follow_user name
  CLIENT.follow(name)
end

#find a tweet by ID
def self.find_tweet id
  CLIENT.status(id)
end

Other things to try

Using this configuration as a basis, you can write methods to automate your bot's behavior and build more complex actions, like searching or tweeting at set intervals, generating tweets with regular expressions, and connecting with an external API to scrape data (like a collection of images at a museum, for instance, or a Wikipedia page's edit history).