Build a Twitter bot (intro to Python)

Twitter bot tutorial: Jumpstart Program 2021 edition

Let's make a bot!! These instructions were written for participants in the 2021 Jumpstart Program, but they're publicly viewable for anyone to follow.

Required libraries: tweepy 3.5, requests, time, os, random. Written in Python 3.

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Installation Specifications

For this workshop, you will need to:

1. Install Visual Studio Code (VS Code)
2. Install Anaconda (which will install Python for you and some of the required libraries listed above)
3. Install the Tweepy library
4. Create a new Twitter account, and use that account to apply for developer status. (Don't use an existing Twitter account that has followers, as you're about to send a zillion tweets that your followers might not want to clutter their feed.) It may take a few hours (occasionally longer) for a developer account to be approved.

Fork this repository

Get this code onto your local machine.

1. Fork this repository by clicking the button labeled 'fork' in the top right corner of this window. This will add this repository to your own GitHub account.

2. Clone the repository to your local machine.

• Go to the repository in your account: github.com/(your account name)/bot-tutorial-jumpstart-2021
• Select the green "Code" button and copy the URL there, which should end in .git
• In your terminal [mac] or command line [windows], navigate to the folder where you want this repository to live (your Desktop, for example), and then run the following command to clone the repository to that location: git clone [repository url ending in .git]

3. Navigate into that repository with the command cd bot-tutorial-jumpstart-2021

Get credentials from your Twitter account

Give your Twitter script the passwords it needs to send tweets via code instead of using the Twitter website. (These steps may have changed since they were written, as Twitter is continually updating their developer account process.)

1. Go to https://developer.twitter.com/en/portal/apps/new and name your new app. (If you get an error message when you click the "Complete" button, try going to the old sign-up form instead)

• This name isn't public; call it something like JumpstartBot

1. On the app's Settings page, scroll down to App Permissions and edit it, changing it from "Read only" to "Read & Write"

2. Find the app's Keys and Tokens page (the tab next to the app's Settings)

• (Re)generate "Access token & secret"

2. Copy API Key/Secret and Access Token/Secret to credentials.template

3. Save that file as a new file named credentials.py

• (Why save with a new filename? Later on, you'll commit and push the changes you make to these files using Git, and those changes will be publicly viewable on your GitHub account. But you don't want to share your bot account's credentials/passwords. The file called .gitignore has credentials.py listed as a file to ignore, so Git will never even see it, and it won't get sent to your GitHub account.)

Basic bot: listbot.py

This script is a basic Twitter bot. It will tweet three things from a list inside the script.

1. Go to the bot-tutorial-jumpstart-2021 folder. Click on listbot.py to see the code

2. Take a look at the script and try to figure out what it's doing. Use the comments (preceded by #) for context.

3. Clicking the green "run" triangle will run the bot. A Terminal will appear at the bottom of the screen with the output

Change it up!

• In tweet_list, add new things for your bot to tweet
• Increase/decrease time between tweets in time.sleep(5) (5 is the number of seconds)

Intermediate bot: textbot.py

This script sends out five tweets from the first five lines of an external .txt file, phrases_coined_by_shakespeare.txt

1. Go to the bot-tutorial-jumpstart-2021 folder. Click on textbot.py

2. Also look at phrases_coined_by_shakespeare.txt to see the text

3. Take a look at both files and try to figure out what it's doing. Use the comments (preceded by #) for context.

4. Select Run

Change it up!

• Make the bot send more or fewer tweets, or change which lines, by editing the numbers in for line in tweettext[0:5].
  • [0:5] means from the first thing up to (but not including) the #5 thing. Programming languages consider 0 to be the first number, so what we'd call "line one" is actually "line zero" to the computer, and "line six" to humans is "line five" to the computer.
• Make a new .txt file for the bot to tweet from. For example, pick a book or poem from gutenberg.org. Then, in textbot.py, replace phrases_coined_by_shakespeare.txt with the newfilename.txt

Advanced bot: talk-mashup-bot.py

This script mixes up talk titles from ALA Annual Conferences 2016–2021. First, it takes a list of talks and splits those titles into potential beginnings and endings. Then, it chooses a random beginning and a random ending, smushes them together into a new talk title, and tweets it. This script also introduces a function, splitTitle(), and demonstrates how to choose a random item in a list using Python's random library.

Change it up!

• In the tweet (tweet_text on line ~70), add a bit of text that comes before the new talk title, like "Your new ALA session is..."
• Use another .txt file instead of ala_all-talk-titles.txt. Use one you have on your computer, or make a new .txt file with movie names or book titles.
• Make a longer title. Above line ~67, add a title_middle_part that picks another random line from beginners or enders (up to you).
• Advanced: Use the splitTitles() function on two different .txt files. Mash together a random item from the first .txt file with a random item from the second .txt file.
• Very advanced: Some parts of this code are repetitive. Use a for loop in the part of the script that picks a random item from beginners and enders and stitches it together, lines ~61-70. Or you could make a new function.
• Very advanced: In the splitTitles() function, split titles into thirds instead of halves (starting at line ~38). Make another list called middle_list (involves some math and finagling to replace midpoint.) Then find a way to pick a random item from your list of middle parts, and work that into your tweet.

Commit & push your changes with Git

You've made changes to these scripts since you first forked them. Now you'll practice committing and pushing those changes so you have a record of your versions.

View an annotated screenshot of how/where to use Git in VS Code

In the Terminal window of VS Code, type these lines, hitting return after each one:

• git add .
• git commit -m "My bot updates"
• git push origin main

You should see a message of success.

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This tutorial and its updated materials were originally put together by Robin Davis (@robincamille) and Mark Eaton (github.com/MarkEEaton) for a pre-conference workshop at Code4Lib 2018. Tori Culler and Robin Davis adapted this workshop for the Library Technology Career Jumpstart Program in 2020.

See original repo: https://github.com/robincamille/bot-tutorial

See also: Davis, Robin, and Mark Eaton. Make a Twitter Bot in Python: Iterative Code Examples. Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy (Blueprints section). April 2016. (Verbose write-up featuring code from a previous version of this workshop.)