Hashtag retweet bot

A bot that retweets all tweets tagged by a certain hashtag. Ideal for conferences, meetup groups, communities, etc.

As an example, let's say you want to retweet every tweet found with the hashtag #icecream every 5 minutes (300 seconds). This ruby gem will let you do it as easily as running:

hashtag_retweet_bot icecream 300

Installation

gem install balinterdi-hashtag_retweet_bot --source http://gems.github.com

Create the database:

mysqladmin create my_conference_db

Create a directory where you will run the bot from, and a config directory with 2 files in it: database.yml for your database settings and bot.yml for the login/password of the twitter account.

mkdir -p bot_for_my_conference/config
cd config/bot_for_my_conference
touch database.yml bot.yml

Put the credentials for the twitter account in bot.yml:

login: my_conference_bot
password: secret

Put the database connection attributes in database.yml:

adapter: mysql
username: root
host: localhost
password:
database: my_conference_db

And create the table on the database that will hold the tweets:

hashtag_retweet_bot create_db_table

Run it

Now the only thing left to do is running the bot, telling it what tag to follow, like that:

hashtag_retweet_bot tag_to_follow

This will launch the bot with a default pause of 180 seconds. If you want a different time schedule you can specify other value for the seconds parameter, but I've experienced Twitter connection problems when trying to update every 60 seconds or less:

hashtag_retweet_bot tag_to_follow seconds_between_updates

Example:

hashtag_retweet_bot icecream
hashtag_retweet_bot icecream 240

Live examples

Some twitterbots using hashtag_retweet_bot:

• @euruko_bot
• @confrorbot
• The bot for the Budapest Ruby User Group

Credits

Original idea and script by Mark Connell for Scotland on Rails 2009. Customization for Euruko '09, and some improvements by Jaime Iniesta. Some improvements and gemification by Balint Erdi.

Please send feedback and bug reports to balint.erdi@gmail.com