NodeJS Twitter Bot

I built this Twitter-Bot built in NodeJS to use social media APIs and web-scraping. This bot is deployed to Heroku and be found at @DailyPlantBot on Twitter, which tweets the top post of selected plant-related subreddits, post a new succulent/cacti every day from a database, retweets every few hours, and responds to activity involving the bot (e.g., liking comments).

This project includes the following:

• The Twitter API (with twit) is used to tweet, tweet with media, search & retweet, like, & notice follows & mentions

• Uses the Reddit API (with snoowrap) to grab the top posts of specified subreddits

• Axios and Cheerio are used for web-scraping to write to a large JSON file to create unique daily tweets

• The functions required to download images from urls, convert to base64 for media uploads, tweet creation etc.

Making Your Own Bot

If you wanted to build something similar, you will first have to connect to Twitter's API by:

1. Creating a Twitter account for the bot (Twitter does not allows multiple accounts on the same email)

2. Log in here and fill in the form for a developer account

3. You can now access the developer portal which has the:

   • Settings for updating details

   • Permissions for the bot (Read/Write/Message)

   • Keys and Access Token tab for your config file

4. Click Create my access token and fill in the fields for your config file, twitter-config.js shows an example of this:

module.exports = {
  consumer_key:         'XXXXXXXX',
  consumer_secret:      'XXXXXXXX',
  access_token:         'XXXXXXXX',
  access_token_secret:  'XXXXXXXX'
}

5. You can now create your own bot with your own values and interact with other APIs or databases

6. Enter `npm start' in your project directory

If you have done it correctly (with immediate function calls) then you should see some activity e.g. the bot tweeting. A running server like Heroku can run your Twitter bot for you.

Credits

Twit API Client for Node

snoowrap JS Wrapper for Reddit API

Axios HTTP Client

Cheerio API

Node Image Downloader

License

Copyright 2020 Charles Leopard

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at

   <http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0>

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.