TwitterDrasta

Draṣṭā (द्रष्टा) meaning, the observer

Helps forwarding Twitter messages from a public twitter handle to a Telegram channel

This bot can be used to check for recent tweets by a public twitter handle and forward it over a Telegram channel, using the Telegram bot API.

Features

• Forward all recent tweets from a public Twitter handle to a Telegram channel
• Auto rollback to update tweets from the last tweet, if the bot was down for a few hours
• Can dig and update last N no of tweets or even all possible tweets
• Rate limit handled protection on Twitter and Telegram API
• Heroku dynos compatible
• Support for custom tweet formatting over telegram

Requirements

For running the script

• Python 3.8 or above
• pip 20.1 or above (To installs the dependencies below)
• Tweepy 3.9 or above
• python-telegram-bot 12.8 or above
• psycopg2 2.8 or above

For making the bot work

• Twitter developer API key and API secret:
• Twitter public handle's username
• Telegram Bot API key
• Telegram Channel Username/ID
• PostgreSQL Server (Optional: only for persistence of last tweet, and for digging and updating old tweets)

Running

First, install the required dependencies if you haven't already installed. The last three dependencies can be installed using pip (using a terminal in this directory) as follows.

pip install -r requirements.txt

Now, create a json based config file for the program, with all required values for all API keys and usernames (put usernames without '@'). The example config file config.json.example will help you making your own config file, make sure the config file is in json format and ends with .json file extension. For ex: my-config.json, /some/path/my-config.json(default: config.json, in the same directory as the script)

Example config.json

{
    "twitter_username" : "PASTE-THE-TWITTER-USERNAME-HERE",
    "twitter_apikey" : "PASTE-THE-TWITTER-API-KEY-HERE",
    "twitter_api_secret" : "PASTE-THE-TWITTER-API-SECRET-HERE",
    "telegram_channel" : "PASTE-THE-TELEGRAM-CHANNEL-USERNAME-HERE",
    "telegram_bot_apikey" : "PASTE-THE-TELEGRAM-BOT-API-KEY-HERE",
    "seek_rate" : 2,
    "max_rollback" : 200,
    "ratelimit_wait" : 16,
    "welcome_text" : "WRITE-A-WELCOME-MESSAGE-FOR-ANYONE-WHO-STARTS-THE-TELEGRAM-BOT",
    "tweet_format" : "{text}\n{url}\n{time}\n",
    "reply_format" : "\u21aa <b>{mentions}</b>\n{text}\n{url}\n{time}\n",
    "retweet_format" : "\ud83d\udd01  <b>{username}{mentions}</b>\n{text}\n{url}\n{time}\n"
}

Config Values

Key	Description
twitter_username	Twitter username of the public handle without @ (Required)
twitter_apikey	Twitter developer API Key (Required)
twitter_api_secret	Twitter developer API Secret (Required)
telegram_channel	Telegram channel username (Required)
telegram_bot_apikey	Telegram Bot API Key (Required)
seek_rate	The time in minutes to wait before seeking newer tweets and upadating on telegram (default: 1)
max_rollback	Maximum no of previous tweets to obtain if the last tweet is not a recent one (default: 50)
ratelimit_wait	The time in minutes to wait before trying again when rate-limited by the Twitter server (default: 15)
welcome_text	Simple welcome / greeting text for the users who visit the Telegram Bot
tweet_format	Formatting for any normal tweet text which would be sent to the Telegram Channel
reply_format	Formatting for the tweet text that is a reply to some other tweet
retweet_format	Formatting for the tweet text that is a retweet of some other tweet
db_name	Database name on the Postgres server (default: test or with DATABASE_URL environment var)
db_host	Postgres server hostname / Ip address (default: localhost or with DATABASE_URL environment var)
db_port	Postgres server port number (default: 5432 or with DATABASE_URL environment var)
db_user	Username for authentication on Postgres server (default: user or with DATABASE_URL environment var)
db_password	Password for authentication on Postgres server (default: pass or with DATABASE_URL environment var)

Next, Make sure the PostgreSQL server is setup with a username and password and it's running (if you want to use the database).

The bot can be configured to use the database server either by hardcoding the values, or through defining DATABASE_URL as environment variable which holds the URI for the postgresql database.

The format for URI for DATABASE_URL should be like,

postgres://<user>:<password>@<hostname>:<port>/<database>

With all setup, start the bot feeding the path of your config file,

python TwitterDrasta.py --config /some/path/my-config.json

OR

python TwitterDrasta.py --config my-config.json

Running using the DATABASE_URL environment variable on the same line,

DATABASE_URL="postgres://<user>:<password>@<hostname>:<port>/<database>" python TwitterDrasta.py --config my-config.json

Setting up on Heroku

The bot is already compatible with heroku dynos, and this repository already contains files for heroku/python buildpack, requirements.txt, runtime.txt and Procfile.

Just create a config file as told above and update the config filename in Procfile arguments (default filename: config.json) and push the contents to heroku git.

Digging and Updating old tweets

This operations is not automatic and it requires a configured PostgreSQL Server running. Make sure DATABASE_URL is defined in the environment variables or the database configurations are hardcoded into the script.

And, this operation may take a lot of time, if the no of tweets to be dug are high.

To dig and update last N no of tweets,

python TwitterDrasta.py --config my-config.json -g N

To dig and update all possible tweets,

python TwitterDrasta.py --config my-config.json -w

Debugging

To run the bot in debug mode, just pass the flag -d or --debug in the arguments.

python TwitterDrasta.py --debug --config my-config.json

Contributing

All kinds of contributions towards the improvement and enhancement of this project are welcome. Any valuable pull request for fixing an issue or enhancing the project are welcome. You can even help by reporting bugs and creating issues for suggestions and ideas related to new improvements and enhancements.

License

This project is under the MIT License