twitter-list-to-slack (Konstabot)

Konstabot is a tool that will extract the most popular posts from a Twitter List and post them to a Slack channel.

This can be a more useful Slack integration than something that pulls out every tweet for every user you specify. Konstabot can optionally apply a blacklist of keywords to ignore, filter out retweets, and specify a minimum number of likes or retweets.

The script can be configured to run as a timed job either on a local machine or on a remote service (such as Heroku).

Example

Example configs/android.yml will point to my Twitter account for a list of Android-related Twitter users. This is what the output will look like in Slack:

Basic Script Usage

Will run the script once, see setup steps below for more details.

bundle install # first-time setup
ruby konstabot.rb # will print out instructions but needs credentials (below)

1. Configure Twitter API integration

1.1 Twitter Auth Tokens

You need some Twitter OAuth tokens to be able to use the Twitter API to read from a list. This needs to be associated with a Twitter account, but the application only needs "Read Only" access, it does not attempt to post anything on your behalf.

• Create a Twitter application
• On the Twitter application page, click "Keys and Access Tokens"
• Create the consumer key and secret
• Under the "Your Access Token" section, create an access token and grant access
• Make sure you set the "Access Level" to "Read Only" for this application

1.2a Create a credentials.yml (when running locally)

Create a credentials.yml at the root of the project, at the same level as the konstabot.rb file:

consumer_key: # Copy your Twitter Consumer Key from the steps above into here
consumer_secret: # Copy your Twitter Secret from the steps above into here
token: # Copy your Twitter Access Token from the steps above into here
secret: # Copy your Twitter Access Token Secret from the steps above into here
slack_webhooks_uri: # This can be added later

This file is not part of the git repository and should not be shared.

1.2b Environment variables (for a cloud setup)

See Cloud Setup instructions

2. Configure Twitter List(s)

Pick the list that you want to follow. If the list is private, then the setup steps for Twitter API above need to link to the same account to which the private list belongs to. While public lists can be read from any Twitter account.

Edit .yml files under configs to set twitter_user to the Twitter handle of the user that owns the list, and set twitter_list to the list slug from the list's URL.

e.g. For https://twitter.com/k_tcher/lists/android:

twitter_user: 'k_tcher'
twitter_list: 'android'

The script will merge multiple lists defined as separate configs/*.yml files into one feed.

3. Other settings and Dry Run

Try out your set up with a dry run:

ruby konstabot.rb -n 10 -d

A dry run will not send anything to Slack yet. You can tune the other settings in config.yml before you start posting to Slack.

4. Set up Slack integration

Set up a Slack Incoming Webhook and paste the URL into configurations.yml

Set the bot name to match the Slack user name in config.xml (this is just a string, script will not fail if you don't change the name).

The script will now post to the specified Slack channel whenever you run it, unless -d (--dry-run) is specified as a parameter.

5. Timed job

Many ways to do this. I've used these two:

5a Cron job

You can setup the script to be run periodically - such as every hour Monday-Friday 9-5pm. This is to be done outside of the script using a different script or your OS settings.

For example on Mac OS X, you can set a cron job using crontab -e:

*/60 9-17 * * 1-5 cd <your checkout directory> && <path to ruby>/ruby konstabot.rb -n 10

See Apple's Documentation for more details on this example.

5b Heroku timed job

See Cloud Setup instructions for more info.

LICENSE

Apache 2.0, see LICENSE for full details.