lara-dotng

Twitter Bot for the awesome Public Transit Directions Assistant - https://lara.ng

This project doesn't try to reinvent the wheel, instead, wraps an existing solution (lara.ng) to provide public transit directions to Twiitter users.

Motivation

I've been using lara.ng for a little over 2years but recently followed them on Twitter and I tried to do this (thinking I would get a reply) 👇 That was when it struck me! There are millions of Nigerians on Twitter, why not make this accessible to them. Afterall, Lara claims to be a (chat) bot.

Challenge

If you didn't know already, there is no public API to interface with lara.ng. To have access, you need to submit a request to hello@lara.ng. Never tried that before so I can't say how easy/painful the process is.

Solution

No API? No Problem! Puppeteer to the rescue!

With puppeteer, I was able to crawl lara.ng, make a request on behalf of the user, intercept its response, parse and send directions to their DM.

How it works

• A user tweets @lara_dotng e.g. @lara_dotng from takwa bay to maryland
• Take the destination query i.e. from takwa bay to maryland
• Crawl lara.ng
  • submit the query
  • intercept & parse the json response
• send parsed response to (Twitter) user DM
• notify user to check their DM

Author

Luqman Olushi (@codeshifu)

License

This project is licensed under MIT