Recontweeter

This code is for a bot to retweet content on twitter using the #econtwitter hashtag. It follows some basic rules. Tweets must:

• Be original content (ie, not retweets or replies)
• Not use more than 3 hashtags themselves
• Be in English
• Be sent in the last couple of days

Among tweets matching the above criteria, the bot does a weighted random sample according to the number of favourites and retweets the tweets have already received.

It also retweets the most popular tweet in the last 7 days on a Friday morning at 9:30 UTC time. Popularity is defined as likes + retweets.

Background

This set up isn't particularly original! You'll find lots of guides online on how to do this. I found these three got me pretty much all the way there:

• Real Python
• Dev.to
• Anne K Johnson

Prerequisites

If you want to run one of these yourself, you'll need:

• An AWS account and the AWS CLI configured on your local machine
• To apply for a Twitter developer account

Beyond that you'll obviously need python installed, and node installed.

Python config

To get a local version of the python environment set up:

python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

You'll need to match up your python version with to the runtime in serverless.yml.

Serverless config

Install the serverless package globally (ie, not just for this project):

npm install -g serverless

And then run (from the top level of this directory):

npm ci

To install the exact dependencies I used from package-lock.json.

Credentials

To handle your credentials for the Twitter API, you'll need to make a file: creds.json that contains your consumer key and access token information. It should look something like:

{
    "API_KEY": "XXXXXXXXXXXXXX",
    "API_SECRET": "XXXXXXXXXXXXXX",
    "ACCESS_TOKEN": "XXXXXXXXXXXXXX",
    "ACCESS_SECRET": "XXXXXXXXXXXXXX"
}

This is where the config.py script is going to load these from.

Making changes

The main place things happen is in retweet.py. It should be fairly obvious which bits to fiddle with for a different hashtag, more/less tweets etc. The frequency is controlled by serverless.yml.

You should be able to run retweet.py locally, but you'll need to add a couple of lines to actually call the retweet function rather than just define it.

Deploying

With everything installed, it should be a case of running (from the root directory of the project):

serverless deploy -v

To deploy to your AWS account. If you don't want to wait two hours or until Friday mornings for the functions to fire run:

serverless invoke -f retweet
serverless invoke -f popular

And if you want to delete the app from your from your AWS account:

serverless remove