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Twitter Bot

Warning

The X/Twitter bot is no longer being used or maintained because of significant changes to the API causing the code to break.

Every time the website updates, it sends out a tweet. In order for it to do that though, you need to set up a Twitter account.

First Time Setup

Follow these steps to set up the Twitter bot for the first time, such as on a new Twitter account.

  1. Create a Twitter account that will host the bot, or login to an account you already have that you want to send automated tweets from.

  2. Go to https://apps.twitter.com/ and sign up for a development account. Note that you will need both a valid phone number and a valid email tied to the developer account in order to use development features.

Note

You will have to wait an hour or two for Twitter.com to get back to you and approve your developer account.

  1. While you are waiting, make sure you have a text file called .env in the root directory of the repo. If you do not, you can create it via the following commands:
type nul >.env

touch .env

  1. Once you are approved by Twitter, go to the Twitter Developer Portal. Click on the app you created, and in the Settings tab, ensure that the App permissions are set to Read and Write instead of only Read.

  2. Now go back to your browser with the Twitter Developer Portal. At the top of the screen, flip to the Keys and tokens. Now it's time to go through the dashboard and get your copy+paste ready. We will be inserting these values into the .env file, which you can edit using a plain text editor such as Notepad or Sublime.

  • The API Key & Secret should should go in the corresponding fields for TWITTER_API_KEY=? and TWITTER_API_KEY_SECRET=?.
  • The Bearer Token should go in the field TWITTER_BEARER_TOKEN=?.
  • The Access Token & Secret should go in the corresponding fields for TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN=? and TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET=?. But first, you will need to regenerate the Access Token & Secret so that it has both read and write permissions.
Success

The .env file should look something like this when you're done:

TWITTER_API_KEY=T5jlO9KNtL2UyffM7s0UhYkks
TWITTER_API_KEY_SECRET=O4Er0BNzyWWjyPcHxGjiDtFXh4zTYMJmWIGLUBKzaOePMKnhba
TWITTER_BEARER_TOKEN=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA3Gs6DHAAAAAAmVr9lhxSholbGiSGlE6gnCJo6XBmCQGo7yiTSZUffHO73NBHJ0CXdfYI4ysiD4mymI72uH88Gt
TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN=gAcpWV4mToPvdijJUYRKV3UxGloMUmaDau5VbSb8LKSP3kCUPp
TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET=RskftNO5RqzZi1d5EOeNXgHpV