bashtag

A simple shell script to post tweets to your timeline using Twitter's v1.1 API.

• Do you live in your CLI?
• Rather not switch to a browser or other device to broadcast to the world?
• Wanna automate tweets of whatever gibberish via cron?

If yes to any of the above... Noice! Keep reading!

Requirements

Your Terminal

AND

PHP >= 5.3.x

OR

OpenSSL

---

Why PHP or OpenSSL?

Well, the signature for authorizing and posting the status update is calculated by passing the signature base string and signing key to the HMAC-SHA1 hashing algorithm. The details of the algorithm are explained in depth HERE, but thankfully there are implementations of HMAC-SHA1 available for every popular language. For example, PHP has the hash_hmac function and HMAC-SHA1 hashing can easily be generated on almost any modern Unix-like system using OpenSSL.

---

• Hashing defaults to PHP if both are installed.

• On a production webserver, typically both would already be installed (see your host if you are unsure).

• If using on your local box and you dont have a l/a/n/mp stack or stand-alone PHP install or OpenSSL installed (really?), then get one of 'em.

• cURL is also required and should be installed by default anyway.

• A quick check:

    # Open up a linux terminal and type:
  
    ~$ which php openssl curl
  
    # If you have 1 or all 3 installed, you should see something similar to:
  
    ~$ which php openssl curl
    /usr/local/bin/php
    /usr/bin/openssl
    /usr/bin/curl
  
    # If you get nothing in return or see somthing like /usr/bin/which: no {SOFTWARE_NAME} in (/usr/local/bin:.....
    # for any of the three, then that particular program is not installed.
  

Configuration

The goal of bashtag is simplicity.

PAUSE

You do however need to make yourself a twitter app!

So basically, you need to:

1. First, go and create yourself a twitter app on the twitter developer site.
2. After creation, click the Settings tab, scroll down and enable read/write access for your twitter app. (This will take a min.)
3. Now, click the Details tab, scroll down and click Create my access token (This will also take a min.)
4. Lastly, click the OAuth tool tab and grab your consumer key/secret and access token/secret:

Ok, got all that?

Now, open up bashtag in your preferred editor and add your app access tokens (lines 47-50).

45        # Your Twitter application's settings.
46        # [EDIT THIS SECTION TO REFLECT YOUR TWITTER APPLICATION'S VALUES]
47    
48            app_key="YOUR_CONSUMER_KEY"
49            app_secret="YOUR_CONSUMER_SECRET"
50            access_token="YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN"
51            access_secret="YOUR_ACCESS_SECRET"    

All that's left to do is to make it executable:

~$ cd /place/to/where/you/downloaded/bashtag/
~$ chmod +x bashtag

and place bashtag in your scripts, bin, or executable dir:

~$ mv bashtag /path/to/your/executable/scripts/

...or create a symlink to bashtag in your scripts, bin, or executable dir:

~$ cd /path/to/your/executable/scripts/
~$ ln -s /place/to/where/you/downloaded/bashtag ./bashtag

Done!

How To bashtag

1. Tweet It. (A tweet oneliner)

    ~$ bashtag this is pretty dope!
   
    #      NOTE: ONLY if using this option (Option 1. - Direct tweet), 
    #            all "hastags" must be escaped with a '\'
   
    ~$ bashtag \#money on my \#mind.
   
    #       WHY: Linux will see it as a comment and ignore everything after the first "#"
    #            * You can however drop quotes arround your tweet to avoid escaping:
   
    ~$ bashtag "i will not escape tweets #boss #idontwanna #2lzy"
   

2. Prompt It. (Prompts you for your message)

    ~$ bashtag
       Whatchu Tweetin' ? [140 pls]: yep this is very simple #bashery
   

3. Pipe It. (Feed bashtag the stdout from another command or series of commands)

    ~$ cat somefile | bashtag
   

4. Cron It. (Automate your tweets)

    */5 * * * * curl -s http://something.from/somewhere | bashtag > /dev/null 2>&1
   

Yep. Pretty awesome right?

If successful, you will see something like:

~$ bashtag Ok. I can do this. \#osohappy

   Tweeted It!

If an error occurs, it will be displayed in un-pretty JSON: o_o

~$ bashtag This is some text that is really long and not less than 140 characters. But it is something I really want to get off of my chest because it is important for me to say it!

   Error: [ {"errors":[{"code":186,"message":"Status is over 140 characters."}]} ]

Limitations

This is a simple CLI tool. Nothing real extravagant here.

It's only for "text only" tweets <= 140 characters and nothing more (at least currently).

However, it's use can be expanded upon as you wish... (Check the Twitter API docs).

I'd love to see/merge what other bashtag things you do with it.

OS's

Tested and confirmed working on:

• Mac OSX 10.9.1+
• CentOS 5.10+
• More to come...

If working for you (or not), please feel free to drop me a line with your OS/Environment.

License

MIT License