A Twitter bot that replies with a forecast.
See it in action by Tweeting at @HiWeatherbot with a location, and look for a reply like this:
Weatherbot is an experiment in building a mildly useful Twitter bot and juggling a bunch of APIs -- including the fabulous darksky.net API.
As an experiment, it's been known to fail. At one point it even went into a crazy loop tweeting at itself (until Twitter wisely put an end to that). If it's not running, feel free to let me know by dropping me a note at john (at) johnkeefe (dot) net.
##Node
The program runs in Node and uses the following node modules to make it all happen:
##Keys
It also requires Twitter API keys and OAUTH tokens you can get by logging into your Twitter account and going to the Apps page for your account at https://apps.twitter.com/.
And by "your" Twitter account I mean an account you control. I wouldn't recommend doing this on your valuable personal account, as it's possible to accidentally run afoul of the Twitter API rules ... which could lock up the account.
The keys, along with an API key from darksky.net, are stored in a file called weatherbot_keys.js in a directory outside the weatherbot folder -- mainly so I didn't accidentally include them here. They are brought in with an include statement near the top of the 'weatherbot.js' file.
The structure of 'weatherbot_keys.js' is like this:
var TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY = 'your_consumer_key_goes_here',
TWITTER_CONSUMER_SECRET = 'your_consumer_secret_goes_here',
TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN = 'your_access_token_goes_here',
TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET = 'your_access_token_secret_goes_here',
FORECAST_IO_API_KEY = 'your_forecast_io_key_goes_here';
module.exports.TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY = TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY;
module.exports.TWITTER_CONSUMER_SECRET = TWITTER_CONSUMER_SECRET;
module.exports.TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN = TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN;
module.exports.TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET = TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET;
module.exports.FORECAST_IO_API_KEY = FORECAST_IO_API_KEY;
Darksky.net used to be forecast.io, hence the FORECAST_IO_API_KEY key name.
##Running
I run this using the node module forever with the following command:
sudo forever start -a -m 1 -l /home/ubuntu/bothouse/weatherbot/log.txt weatherbot.js
-m 1 means it won't restart more than 1 time, preventing twitter rate-limit problems. -l [path] is the place to save the log. -a appends to the log.