The world of Ian Hill

Twitterbots - Automating everything

In the previous pages we now know how to tweet text and images, shout-out to new followers, reply to mentions, and get trending hashtags. While this is all nice and that, we need more automation here...

Pages in this series...

Page 1: Overview
Page 2: Tweeting randomly
Page 3: Tweeting pictures
Page 4: Tweeting new followers
Page 5: Tweeting replies to mentions
Page 6: Scanning for trending hashtags
Page 7: Automating everything

Vader has one more script that starts at boot, and periodically runs one of the scripts, the text and picture scripts run randomly, one of them will run once up to every three hours, the follower script will run at four hour intervals (03:30, 07:30, 11:30, 15:30, 19:30, and 23:30)
The mentions script runs at quarter past the hour, every hour. My other twitterbots are staggered between these times

I call this script runtweets.py, and it gets started from /etc/rc.local

#!/usr/bin/env python
import sys
import time
import datetime
import os
from random import randint
from time import strftime

# Write to the log file to tell when the engine started
= int(time.time())
st = datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(ts).strftime('%H:%M:%S %d-%m-%Y')
fileName = datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(ts).strftime('%Y%m%d')
text_file = open("/var/www/html/" + fileName + ".log", "a")
text_file.write("\nTwitter engine started at: " + st + "\n")
text_file.close()

# Sleep for 30 seconds so the Pi can stabilize after boot
time.sleep(30)

# Tweet once on startup
execfile ("/home/pi/updatetwitter.py")
# Get current time
ts = int(time.time())
# Set the nextTweet time for up to five minutes from now
nextTweet = (randint(ts, ts + 300))

# Write a time stamp to the /var/www/html folder, so the webpage knows when the next tweet is scheduled for
text_file = open("/var/www/html/nexttweet.txt", "w+")
text_file.write(str(nextTweet))
text_file.close()

# Main loop starts now
# Update token in web folder to show the engine is still running
while True:
   text_file = open("/var/www/html/check.log", "w+")
   text_file.write("Check!")
   text_file.close()

   ts = int(time.time())

   # Decide whether the next tweet is to be a normal tweet, or a picture
   twitType = (randint(1,2))

   # The nextTweet variable is set later with a random time, if the current time is equal, or after the nextTweet variable, then the following code runs
   if ts >= nextTweet:
      try:
         if twitType == 1:
            execfile("/home/pi/updatetwitterpicture.py")
         elif twitType == 2:
            execfile("/home/pi/updatetwitter.py")
      except Exception:
         pass
      # Generate a random time between now and three hours and update the file in the web folder
      nextTweet = (randint(ts, ts + 10800))
      text_file = open("/var/www/html/nexttweet.txt", "w+")
      text_file.write(str(nextTweet))
      text_file.close()

   # If either of the following tokens exist, then do the relevant action
   if os.path.exists('/var/www/html/tweet1'):
      try:
         execfile ("/home/pi/updatetwitterpicture.py")
         os.remove('/var/www/html/tweet1') # Delete token
      except OSError:
         pass
   if os.path.exists('/var/www/html/tweet2'):
      try:
         execfile ("/home/pi/updatetwitter.py")
         os.remove('/var/www/html/tweet2') # Delete token
      except OSError:
         pass
   # Sleep for one second before running again
   time.sleep(1)

This script handles the whole automation of the twitterbot, it can detect tokens left by the PHP web page in the /var/www/html folder, so tweeting on demand via a webpage is possible

I also have a monitor script that runs every 15 minutes, that checks to see if this script is running, and restarts it if it isn't. also there is a backup script that backs up everything to a network drive and a cleanup script that moves any log files that are older than seven days to another folder. Finally the transfer.py script moves photo's uploaded via the web page to the images folder so they can be tweeted later

The mention and followers scripts have been added to crontab, so the system starts them at the appropriate times, you could add the updatetwitter scripts here if you only wanted to send tweets at specified times

In the ianwilliamhill twitterbot, I have integrated the mail programme so I can be notified by email of any new followers or mentions, as Vader gets loads of mentions and follows, I haven't added this feature as I would get spammed with emails all day

If you're wondering about direct messages, I can never make them work, it seems Twitter keeps moving the goalposts with accessing DM's, so I gave up

This is pretty much it for the code to control a twitterbot, all that's left now is the web pages to monitor and control them...

For more project ideas check out my other projects here

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