How to Build a Twitter Bot

Building a Twitter bot with Node.JS

Building a twitter bot looks deceptively easy. It really isn’t hard to do, but there are pitfalls that I landed in that made my life a lot harder. Here I am going to go over the major steps on how I built a simple twitter bot. I am also going to go over why I built it so you can see how you can make the mundane tasks a little better throughout your day. I will also highlight the big steps that cause me some headaches and how I would recommend avoiding them.

Requirements To Build A Twitter Bot

The requirements for this project are simple. Have Node.JS installed, an IDE or text editor you like, a twitter account you would like to turn into a bot. Also, some time will help you in this endeavor.

Why I build the Bot

I saw while scrolling mindlessly on my twitter feed my twitter friend asked for bot that would reminder her once a week to feed their isopods. This was a fun little project that my developer brain loved to tackle. Having fun with a new api, helping someone with a cool hobby, and using technology to wrap it with a bow. Right down my alley. First thing was first. The requirements for this project were simple. Tweet once a week with a person tagged in the tweet. Perfect.

Set Up

The first step in this whole process is to get a twitter account that you would like to turn into your bot account. For me I registered a dummy gmail account and used that to sign up for twitter. I got a handle I wanted that was clear what this account was for, I had the words isopod and bot in it. The easy part was over.

Next up, we need to sign up for the api. Head over to https://developer.twitter.com/ and head over to the Join button that is on the home page. Fill out the form, and you are ready to begin your twitter journey!

Please ignore all keys that are generated for you at this time. We are going to need to reissue them with updated permissions in a few minutes.

Now that you have a Twitter developer account, it’s time for us to crack some eggs. In these next steps we will change our bots permissions settings as well as generate some new keys for us in the process.

First head to your developer dashboard. Here you will see the total tweets you have used for the month, as well as your new project name. Click the gear icon / app setting in that project. At the very bottom of the setting, you will see a card with “User authentication settings”. Click the edit icon. Here you have your app permissions as well as app info. Change your app permission to read and write, type of app to “Web App, Automated App or Bot”, and fill out the app info. You can use your machines local IP address (192.168…) for the Callback URI / Redirect URL information, and a personal site for your Website URL. Save these changes.

Next up, key generation. Head back to your dashboard, and hit the icon that looks like a key. Regenerate the following keys and keep notes of them: API Key and Secret, Bearer Token, and Access Token and Secret. These we will need to use to authenticate to the API. It is critical you appropriately updated your app permissions correctly or else you will not be able to post new content, only read existing content. I have more fun creating stuff on the interwebs than reading from it, but that’s just me.

The Code

We are here. We can code. Start a new node project using yarn init or npm init. Go ahead and add our packages that we want. I opted for these three:

yarn add @netlify/functions dotenv twitter-api-v2

We are cooking with gas at this point. I structured my project into 3 different folders: client, consts, and functions. First we will build our twitter client, then our functions. Our constants are there for our reference, or in my case that is were I put my canned tweets. At this point also add .env to your .gitignore file add add your tokens that you generated previously with that.

Our clients code is simple. We are going to import TwitterApi from the corresponding package, pass our keys into that, and export it. Bare bones the file will look like this:

const {TwitterApi} = require("twitter-api-v2");
const client = new TwitterApi(
{
appKey: process.env.API_KEY,
appSecret: process.env.API_KEY_SECRET,
accessToken: process.env.API_ACCESS_TOKEN,
accessSecret: process.env.API_TOKEN_SECRET,
}
);
const bearer = new TwitterApi(process.env.BEARER_TOKEN);
const twitterClient = client.readWrite;
const twitterBearer = bearer.readOnly;

module.exports = {twitterClient, twitterBearer};

Now in your functions, all you need is to import your new twitterClient, and then use your function to post!

await twitterClient.v2.tweet("Hello World");

Go forth and use this knowledge for good.