Announce new releases on X

[jimtng]

I found a link to openhab's account on x.com at the bottom of openhab.org website, but there seems to have been no posts made there ever. https://x.com/openhab

I was thinking that perhaps we could at least automatically announce every new release there using a github action. We'd need to get an API key from x.com and write a short github action.

Copilot came up with the following github workflow:

name: Announce openHAB Distro Release on X

on:
  repository_dispatch:
  release:
    types: [published]

jobs:
  announce:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
      - name: Post to X
        env:
          API_KEY: ${{ secrets.X_API_KEY }}
          API_SECRET: ${{ secrets.X_API_SECRET }}
          ACCESS_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.X_ACCESS_TOKEN }}
          ACCESS_SECRET: ${{ secrets.X_ACCESS_SECRET }}
          RELEASE_TAG: ${{ github.event.release.tag_name }}
          RELEASE_URL: ${{ github.event.release.html_url }}
        run: |
          npm install twitter-api-v2

          node << 'EOF'
          const { TwitterApi } = require('twitter-api-v2');

          const client = new TwitterApi({
            appKey: process.env.API_KEY,
            appSecret: process.env.API_SECRET,
            accessToken: process.env.ACCESS_TOKEN,
            accessSecret: process.env.ACCESS_SECRET,
          });

          const text = `New openHAB Distribution release: ${process.env.RELEASE_TAG}\n${process.env.RELEASE_URL}`;

          client.v2.tweet(text)
            .then(() => console.log("Posted to X"))
            .catch(err => {
              console.error("Error posting to X:", err);
              process.exit(1);
            });
          EOF

This needs to be done by someone with access to the github repo secrets management.

[kaikreuzer]

Why do you think that no posts have been made ever? I announce almost every release there, just see the posts from last night:

Is there any permission issue that you cannot see those posts that I need to address?

[jimtng]

Oops my bad! One needed to login first in order to see them!

Here's what I saw before logging in - I am not normally logged in to X

I just now noticed "1616 posts" in the screenshot.

[kaikreuzer]

Maybe you should submit a bug report at X for that - the message "openHAB hasn't posted" is clearly misleading. 😉

[jimtng]

An idea: jruby.org used to display their announcements as a feed from twitter on their main web site, but they now switched to displaying their post through mastodon: see www.jruby.org - perhaps we could add something similar to openhab.org

[jimtng]

and I suspect that part of the reasons they switched to mastodon is because X now limits the feed only to logged in users.

[kaikreuzer]

We actually had this as well on our website, see https://github.com/openhab/openhab-website/blob/2c4f67a860c143676fe109f5e593f0514235069a/.vuepress/theme/layouts/HomeLayout.vue#L150