A Hackable Twitter Bookmarking System

Tweetbox is a bookmarking system for Tweets.

I learned the hard way (disappearing bookmarks) that there is a hard limit on the number of tweets that fit in Twitter's native bookmarker.

That coupled with the inability to add any context or find certain tweets inspired this project.

Tweetbox is made up of two servers that talk to one database to store tweet data.

• tweetbox receives the payloads from liked tweets via Twitter webhook, storing them in a database (open endpoint)
• tweetbox_client serves the tweets to a UI

Configuration & Deployment

Creating the tweetbox server

This app runs on Deta, but can be easily modified to run elsewhere, you will need a database.

Clone this repository and enter the tweetbox sub-directory.

Install the deta cli and use the deta new command to create the tweetbox server.

Note the url of tweetbox for the next step.

Creating a Twitter App, Permissions & Grabbing Tokens

This application requires you to create an app from the Twitter Developer Portal.

In the Twitter app creation form paste the tweetbox url from the last step into the website url field.

Once you've created your app, you need to set the permissions and grab the authentication tokens from Twitter.

Permissions

Navigate to the app's Permissions panel and change the permissions setting to Read, write, and Direct Messages. This permission level is necessary to subscribe to the account activity webhook.

Grabbing the Tokens

Navigate to the app's Keys and Tokens panel, then generate (if necessary) and copy 4 tokens:

Consumer API Keys

• API key
• API secret key

Access Token and Access Token Secret

• Access Token
• Access Token Secret

Creating the Twitter Dev Environment

Navigate to the Twitter Dev Environments page (https://developer.twitter.com/en/account/environments) and set up the Account Activity API / Sandbox environment with the label dev.

Creating the .env file

Now you have all the information to create the .env file in the tweetbox directory.

TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY=<API Key>
TWITTER_CONSUMER_SECRET=<API Secret Key>
TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN=<Access Toek>
TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET=<Access Token Secret>
TWITTER_WEBHOOK_ENV=dev

From this directory, add these env vars to the server with the command:

deta update -e .env

Creating The Webhook & Subscription

Twitter requires you to create the Webhook and Subcription to the account activity via api calls.

For this, a public endpoint is required.

Open your server by typing in:

deta auth disable

From the tweetbox directory, create the webhook with the command deta run create.

Then subscribe to your account activity with the command deta run subscribe.

If these two commands were successful, you can start liking tweets, which will save them to your tweetbox.

Creating the tweetbox client

Navigate to the tweetbox_client sub directory and enter the command deta new.

You can visit the client url and all your saved tweets should display.