Building and Deploying Random Quote Twitter Bot Easy Way

5 min readJul 19, 2018

Medium is full of post about twitter bots. Why another bot post? 🤔 🤔 Chill 😎 we will be learning to build fully functional Twitter Bot which can grab the random quotes and tweet the quotes on it’s own. We will be deploying our bot to heroku and embed twitter time line in our static website.

What this bot will do?

This is a simple Twitter bot which will retrieve Quotes from the Formastic Api and post the quotes with #quotes and smiley emoji. This bot favorite #Nature post and stream the tweet about Nepal in command prompt.

What you need?

You must have Node.js installed on your system.
A Twitter Account.
Your bot will be using node-twitter which is an npm module to manipulate tweets and streams, and to communicate with the Twitter API.
Heroku account which is Platform as a Service (PaaS) that effortlessly serves and host our webapps.

Let’s Start

Create the new folder and initialize it with npm init -f which will initialize package.json file with default setting or use can use npm init.

Create index.js and tweet.js which will be our server and Tweet script respectively.

Your current directory structure should look like this:

root/Twitter_bot
|- index.js
|- tweet.js
|- package.json

Create the folder inside Twitter_bot as a config where we will be having our app secret from the Twitter API

Config folder looks like this:

root/Twitter_bot/config
|- dev.js
|- keys.js
|- prod.js

Configuring and granting permissions from Twitter API

After logging to to your Twitter account, follow to this link: https://apps.twitter.com/app/new to create a new application. Fill out the necessary fields in the form click on the button Create Your Twitter Application. After creating the application, look for ‘Keys and Access Tokens’ under the nav-panes and click on ‘Generate Token Actions` and then copy:

Consumer Key
Consumer Secret
Access Token
Access Token Secret

Open the dev.js file and paste all four values inside it. Expose those values using module.export:

//config.js
/** TWITTER APP CONFIGURATION
 * consumer_key
 * consumer_secret
 * access_token
 * access_token_secret
 */module.exports = {
  consumer_key: '',  
  consumer_secret: '',
  access_token: '',  
  access_token_secret: ''
};

Open the prod.js file and paste all four values inside it.

//prod.js
/** TWITTER APP CONFIGURATION
 * consumer_key
 * consumer_secret
 * access_token
 * access_token_secret
 */ module.exports={
  consumer_key: process.env.TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY,
  consumer_secret: process.env.TWITTER_CONSUMER_SECRET,
  access_token_key: process.env.TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_KEY,
  access_token_secret: process.env.TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET
};

We will be using this value later to deploy our bot to heroku.

In the keys.js file and paste these:

if(process.env.NODE_ENV === 'production'){
 module.exports = require('./prod');
} else{
 module.exports=require('./dev');
}

That’s it for our config file. Let’s move on.

Building the server

When deploying to heroku and making our twitter bot tweet automated we need express server.

index.js
const express = require('express');
const app = express();
const port = process.env.PORT||5000;
app.listen(port,()=>{
 console.log(`Server is running at port ${port}`);
})

Now,our server is up and running now we shift our focus to main task of utilizing twitter API to create Quote Bot.

Quote Bot

We will start by installing the dependency we need for our application.

$ npm install --save twitter

After the dependency has finished installing, go to the tweet.js file and require the dependency and config. file.

const Hero= require(’twit’);
const Keys= require(’.config/keys’);

Pass the configuration (consumer and access tokens) of our Twitter application in dev.js to twitter:

const Hero = new Twitter(Keys);

So far, so good?

Let’s write a function expression that finds the random quotes from Formastic Api and tweet this quote.

Let’s Install additional dependency to get access to Formastic API

const request = require('request');
const requestPromise = require('request-promise');
const API_URL = 'https://api.forismatic.com/api/1.0/?method=getQuote&lang=en&format=json';

Let’s write the function that will actually get information from API and post tweets .

const getQuote = (() => {
 
 /* request options */
 const OPTIONS = {
 uri: API_URL,
 json: true
 };
 requestPromise( OPTIONS )
 /* Successful call */
 .then( (response) => {
 if ( !response )
 getQuote();let quoteText = response.quoteText;
 let author = response.quoteAuthor || “Unknown”;
 let fullQuote = `”${quoteText}”` + “ — “ +` ${author}`
 
 printQuote( fullQuote );
 Hero.post(‘statuses/update’, {status: fullQuote+’😊😊 #Quotes’}, function(error, tweet, response){
 if(error){
 console.log(error);
 }
 console.log(tweet); // Tweet body.
 console.log(response); // Raw response object.
});
 })/* Handling errors */
 .catch( (err) => {
 console.log(“Unable to retrieve quote, try again”);
 })})();
let printQuote = (fullQuote) => {
 console.log( fullQuote )
}

Favorite Bot

We will initialise a params object that will hold various properties to search a tweet, but most importantly query or q property that will refine our searches. Whatever value you feed in this property, our bot will search the tweets to favorite based on this criteria. For our example bot, we have find latest tweets on #nature. The result_type:'mixed recent' will find recent and popular tweet in the searched parameters and favorite these tweet.

const params = {
 q: ‘#Nature’,
 result_type: ‘mixed recent’,
 lang: ‘en’ 
 }

Functional part of Favorite Bot

Hero.get('search/tweets', params, function(err, data, response) {
  // If there is no error, proceed
  if(!err){
    // Loop through the returned tweets
    for(let i = 0; i < data.statuses.length; i++){
      // Get the tweet Id from the returned data
      let id = { id: data.statuses[i].id_str }
      // Try to Favorite the selected Tweet
      Hero.post('favorites/create', id, function(err, response){
        // If the favorite fails, log the error message
        if(err){
          console.log(err[0].message);
        }
        // If the favorite is successful, log the url of the tweet
        else{
          let username = response.user.screen_name;
          let tweetId = response.id_str;
          console.log('Favorited: ', `https://twitter.com/${username}/status/${tweetId}`)
        }
      });
    }
  } else {
    console.log(err);
  }
})

Tada you have created your twitter bot !!

Now, in your index.js file simply require tweet.js as:

require('./app');

index.js should look like this

const express = require('express');
const app = express();
require('./app');

app.use(express.static('public'));
const port = process.env.PORT||5000;
app.listen(port,()=>{
 console.log(`Server is running at port ${port}`);
})

In the package.json file add the start script as

"scripts": {
    "start": "node index.js"
  },

Then from the terminal run npm start

To Deploying Bots to Heroku

I assume you are familiar with Heroku Platform. If not don’t sweat it you can read it from Here.

Create a public in the root directory and add the index.html file then inside of index.html add the following embed script inside the body tag which will simply emded your twitter time line.

</style>
<a class="twitter-timeline" href="https://twitter.com/CoastQuote?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">Tweets by CoastQuote</a> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script> 
<script>

Note that

app.use(express.static('public'));

This will serve our static HTML. You can made fully dynamic as well.

GIT and HEROKU

Initialize git for your project if you haven’t done already.

$ git init
$ git add remote origin //From your repo$ git add .
$ git commit -m "Quote Bot Finished"
$ git push origin master
$ heroku create
$ git push heroku master
$ heroku open //your bot will be live on your browser

Automated twitter bot deployed on Heroku

This is mine first medium post so bare with me for mistakes.

You can find source code at here.