Making a Twitter bot using Python and Heroku.

With about 15% of Twitter being composed of bots, I wanted to try my hand at it.

Twitter Profile: NineBit

Disclaimer

I hold no liability for what you do with this script or what happens to you by using this script. Abusing this script can get you banned from Twitter, so make sure to read up on proper usage of the Twitter API.

This repo teaches you how to:

• Make a Twitter bot using Tweepy (An easy-to-use Python library for accessing the Twitter API).
• Use PRAW (The Python Reddit API Wrapper) Python package.
• Deploy your Reddit Bot on Heroku - A platform as a service (PaaS) that enables developers to build, run, and operate applications entirely in the cloud

In this repo, I have made a twitter bot that cross post content between reddit's subreddit and Twitter.

Setup

Download all the required packages

• pip install tweepy
• pip install pygsheets
• pip install praw
• pip install wget

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Credentials

Next, we need to link our Twitter account to our Python script. Go to Twitter Developers and sign in with your account. Create a Twitter application and generate Consumer Key, Consumer Secret, Access Token, and Access Token Secret.

Obtain OAuth2 credentials from Google Developers Console for google spreadsheet api and drive api and save the file as google-credentials.json

Obtain credentials from Reddit preferences for reddit api.

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Libraries

Tweepy:An easy-to-use Python library for accessing the Twitter API.

• To post tweets.
• To like all tweets posted.

Pygsheets:A simple, intuitive python library to access google spreadsheets through the Google Sheets API v4.

• To maintain records of all tweets posted.
• To avoid duplicate tweets.
• To manage hastag list.
• To manage subreddit list.

PRAW:The Python Reddit API Wrapper

• To search for submission within subreddits.

WGet:GNU WGet is a computer program that retrieves content from web servers.

• To download images from reddit.

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Heroku

To host python script on HerokuHeroku you need to do a few things.

• Define a requirements.txt file in the root of your project that lists your dependencies. This is what Heroku will use to 'detect' you're using a Python app.
• Add to Procfile: worker: python main.py
• Save all your credentials in Config Vars (environment variables).
• To run the app correctly you need to save the content of your google credentials file in a variable named GOOGLE_CREDENTIALS and then create another environment variable with key=GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS and value = google-credentials.json.
• Then create a buildpack. Instructions Here

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Format Google sheet

• Column A contains list of subreddits.
• Column B contains list of hashtag that goes with the tweet.
• Column C contains list of ids of post posted.

A	B	C
itookapicture	#MondayMood	hb1jdk
spaceporn	#TuesdayThoughts	gm3ski
wallpaper	#WednesdayWisdom	gt2p2u
iWallpaper	#ThursdayThoughts	hbdpjv
EarthPorn	#FridayFeeling	hbht7o
telephotolandscapes	#SaturdayThoughts	har8qo
BackgroundArt	#LazySunday	hb710q

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How to look for a post by its id on Reddit.

Concatenate post id at last to access the post on reddit and get more details. LINK

• Example : https://www.reddit.com/by_id/t3_hb1jdk

Future Work

• To implement ML so that bot posts original content.
• To get meaningful insights on how people post throughout year.

Wrapping up

This bot will continue to post until Heroku removes its free tier or I run out of Dyno hours.