Twitter Bot

July 2020 by Nick

Hibot is a Twitter bot which can tweet a message in 100+ different languages. For now, Hibot tweets hello every day in another language. It runs on my Raspberry Pi which is configured to execute the script every day at 19:00 GMT+1. I might switch up the message in the future. We'll see.

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Project Breakdown

1. Twitter API
2. Translator
3. Language picker
4. Scheduler

1. Twitter API

Install and import tweepy. This is a Python library to access the Twitter API.

import tweepy  # pip install tweepy

Authenticate the Python script with your Twitter account using keys & tokens. These can be generated if you upgrade your account to a developer account.

API_KEY = os.environ.get("TWITTER_API_KEY")
API_SECRET_KEY = os.environ.get("TWITTER_API_SECRET_KEY")
ACCESS_TOKEN = os.environ.get("TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN")
ACCESS_SECRET_TOKEN = os.environ.get("TWITTER_ACCESS_SECRET_TOKEN")
      
if API_KEY is None or API_SECRET_KEY is None:
  exit("API KEYS are None!")
if ACCESS_TOKEN is None or ACCESS_SECRET_TOKEN is None:
  exit("ACCESS TOKENS are None!")
      
auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(API_KEY, API_SECRET_KEY)
auth.set_access_token(ACCESS_TOKEN, ACCESS_SECRET_TOKEN)

Tweet a tweet with the update_status() method.

api = tweepy.API(auth)
message = "I'm tweeting a tweet"
api.update_status(message)

2. Translator

Install and import googletrans.

from googletrans import Translator  # pip install googletrans

Translate a message in English to a destination language. Languages are chosen using their language codes.

msg = "hello"
translator = Translator()
translated = translator.translate(msg, src="en", dest=language_code)

3. Language picker

The destination language is different each time. I've made a LanguagePicker class which reads & writes an index from/to a file. The index is used to decide which destination language to pick, from a dictionary with all the supported languages and their corresponding language code.

@staticmethod
def get_languages():
    """
    Language dictionary like googletrans.LANGUAGES but without the old duplicated languages.
    :return: All languages with their code
    :rtype: dict
    """
    return {
        'af': 'afrikaans',
        'sq': 'albanian',
        'am': 'amharic',

4. Scheduler

The codebase is copied to my Raspberry Pi. To run the script automatically every day, a new crontab is configured. Crontab is a unix command to execute a program or script periodically on a given schedule.

Run the crontab -e command to edit.

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ crontab -e

Tell the crontab what script to execute, with which Python executable and with which schedule. Crontab guru is a helpful website to set the schedule.

# Run python script every day at 19:00
0 19 * * * . $HOME/.profile; ~/Documents/hibot/venv/bin/python3 ~/Documents/hibot/main.py

The Twitter secret keys & tokens are set as environment variables in the ~/.profile file.

export TWITTER_API_KEY=
export TWITTER_API_SECRET_KEY=
export TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN=
export TWITTER_ACCESS_SECRET_TOKEN=

The cron job knows nothing about the environment. That's why . $HOME/.profile; is set before executing the python script.