README

You can use this app to find followers of a given user.

If the user has not already been searched for:

1. You can submit a form to query the Twitter API for their followers

2. Followers will then be returned to you from the Twitter API immediately

If the user has already been searched for:

1. You can click on their username to view their followers stored in the database

2. You'll be redirected to the appropriate user page and all the stored followers will be returned to you.

Bonus

After users and followers have been stored in the database, these followers are updated periodically every 12 hours using a batch worker.

About the app

This app uses the twitter gem to query the Twitter API.

It uses VCR to mock the API calls.

It also uses Sidekiq and Redis to queue workers so that the user doesn't have to wait around for the followers to be stored in the database.

It is deployed on Heroku via: https://find-followers.herokuapp.com/

IMPORTANT: Occassionally you may not be able to search for users due to the following error:

Twitter::Error::TooManyRequests - Rate limit exceeded

For more information see here: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/a/2008/what-does-rate-limit-exceeded-mean-updated.html

If this happens, you may have to wait up to an hour for it to work again.

Setup

Note - You will need to have redis installed:

gem install redis

To run the app, do the following:

git clone git@github.com:rubyandcoffee/find_followers.git
cd find_followers

Now you'll need to set your environment keys in a .env file at the root of the project:

TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY=yourtwitterconsumerkey
TWITTER_CONSUMER_SECRET=yourtwitterconsumersecret
TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN=yourtwitteraccesstoken
TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET=yourtwittertokensecret
SIDEKIQ_AUTH_USERNAME=yoursidekiqauthusername
SIDEKIQ_AUTH_PASSWORD=yoursidekiqauthpassword

Note: You only need to set SIDEKIQ_AUTH_USERNAME and SIDEKIQ_AUTH_PASSWORD if you change the sidekiq monitoring (in the routes file) to include development environment.

You can now run the app:

bundle exec rails server

Then, in another tab:

bundle exec sidekiq

And in another tab:

redis-server

You can then view the app on:

localhost:3000