MQTWIT

** This program is obsolete: see mqttwarn for a much more capable program **

This program subscribes to an MQTT topic, extracts the text (!) payload, truncates that to about 140 and tweets the result on a configurable Twitter account.

History

Around 2013 (or whenever it was that Twitter changed their API) I had a bunch of programs which tweeted things. Some I'd written in Perl others in Python, etc. On the day of the API change, everything broke. I had to chase down all my scripts, again try and find libraries I'd used, etc. It turned out most of those libs had either been abandoned or not yet updated -- chaos.

Never again.

Simultaneously I was doing more and more MQTT, and it occurred to me to have a "single point of exit" (or failure? :-) to Twitter. That's how mqtwit was born.

Example

mosquitto_pub -t home/status/1 -m 'Hello peeps!'

Result:

Configuration

Export an environment variable called MQTWITCONF containing the path of your configuration file (defaults to mqtwit.conf). This allows you to run multiple instances with different Twitter accounts, if you need that.

Configure mqtwit.conf by copying the sample file mqtwit.conf.sample and adjust to your environment.

# Twitter
consumer_key            = 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx'
consumer_secret         = 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx'
token                   = 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx'
token_secret            = 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx'

# Optional: lat, long, place for adding Geo location to your tweets
lat     = None
lon     = None
place   = None

mqtt_broker = 'localhost'
mqtt_broker_port = 1883

topic = 'home/status/#'

# Optional: credentials for broker (may be None)
username = None
password = None

Requirements

• Twitter auth tokens
• MQTT broker (e.g. Mosquitto)
• Mosquitto.py
• Python Twitter