twitbot-tih

A Twitter bot that tweets today-in-history events.

Dependencies

• Python 3 with virtual environment. On Ubuntu, install python3-virtualenv.

• Unix/Linux environment and the 'date' command

• If you run on a Raspberry Pi, you might need to install rng-tools for the SSL connection to work

Usage

1. Install with the following commands

   git clone https://github.com/syncom/twitbot-tih.git
   cd twitbot-tih
   make install

2. Create a Twitter app and obtain the API Key, API Secret, Access Token, and Access Token Secret for the app. This can be done by following the instructions at: https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api/getting-started/getting-access-to-the-twitter-api. After April 2023, if you start seeing API authentication errors, and a message like "This app has violated Twitter rules and policies" on the Twitter app setting page, sign up for the Free tier of "Twitter API v2" (at no cost), and clicked button "downgrade to free"; this resolved the auth issue (reference). You may also need to put the Twitter app under a "project" for better organization and monitoring of the app.

3. Set up authentication and authorization secrets. The preferred way is to set environment variables TIH_API_KEY, TIH_API_SECRET, TIH_ACCESS_TOKEN, and TIH_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET with API Key, API Secret, Access Token, and Access Token Secret values obtained in the last step. Alternatively, one can override the corresponding strings in the file .auth with appropriate secret strings. When any of the aforementioned environment variables are set, they take precedence over values in the .auth file.

4. Activate the virtual environment.

   . ./venv

5. In virtual environment, run python today_in_history_bot.py to tweet.

6. (Optional) Create a cron job to invoke the bot once a day. twitbot-tih-run.sh shows an example script that can be called within the cronjob.

7. To uninstall, deactivate from the virtual environment if needed, and do make clean.