Randomized YouTube GIF Twitter Bot

The YouTubeGiffer bot controls a Twitter account that tweets GIFs that are created randomly created from a given YouTube video. The bot accepts tweets containing YouTube video URLs directed to the account as input, creates a GIF of random length and start time, and posts the GIF as a reply to the user who initially tweeted at the bot's account.

Currently, the bot does not post the GIF directly to Twitter, but rather uploads the image to Gfycat, and tweets the Gfycat URL for the GIF. This is done to circumvent the 3MB size cap on images on Twitter. Many of the images created through this bot are rather large, and would definitely not fit on Twitter.

Configuration

The YouTubeGiffer bot's authentication can be configured in two different ways: by setting up a key file named keys.py, or if being deployed on a Heroku server, using Heroku configuration variables.

Heroku Configuration Variables

If using Heroku's config variables to authenticate the bot, the following variables must be set:

• ACCESS_KEY: Twitter account access key (API key)
• ACCESS_SECRET: Twitter account secret token (API secret)
• CONSUMER_TOKEN: Twitter app consumer token (API key)
• CONSUMER_SECRET: Twitter app secret token (API secret)
• DATABASE_URL: URL to a SQL database

Keys File

This bot script requires a configuration file named keys.py. Contained within the keys.py file, the authentication information for the Twitter app and Twitter account to be used are to be stored in a dictionary named keys of the following format:

keys = {
    consumer_token = "TOKEN", # Twitter app API key
    consumer_secret = "SECRET", # Twitter app API secret
    access_key = "ACCESS_KEY", # Twitter account API key
    access_secret = "ACCESS_SECRET", # Twitter account API secret
}

Note: As of now, the keys.py file approach has yet to be updated to accept a database URL.