/bog-twitter-bot

https://github.com/GTBitsOfGood/twitter-bot

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Bits of Good

Bootcamp Twitter Bot

This repo is used by the Bits of Good Bootcamp to build a Twitter bot that demonstrates important concepts related to Node.js, APIs, and database technologies used by Bits of Good project teams.

Learn more about Bits of Good and our Bootcamp at bitsofgood.org!

Challenges

For each challenge listed below, there is a corresponding branch that will have the solution to that challenge. Each step builds on the one before it, so make sure that you go one challenge at a time! When you think you have it, go ahead and compare your repository/code to the solution branch and see how you did.

Workshop 1

  1. Initialize this repository as an NPM package

  2. Install each of the following packages:

    • express
    • twitter
    • body-parser
    • dotenv

  3. Get an Express server up and running with an endpoint for POST requests to the /tweets path

  4. Read about Express middleware

  5. Using the express.static middleware, get Express to use the public/ folder in this repository so that you can visit the tweet/index.html page from your browser by visiting http://localhost:3000/tweet

    • Hint: If a folder has index.html inside of it, you can access that file from your browser by the folder name!

  6. Using the body-parser NPM documentation as a reference, pick a middleware from the body-parser package that will allow you to easily access form data in your handler functions

    • Hint: Form data is URL-encoded!

  7. Ask Max for the API keys you need to use the Twitter API. Put what he gives you in a new .env file in this repository.

  8. Read this Medium article on what environment variables are and why we use them.

  9. Use the dotenv NPM docs to figure out how to load in environment variables from the .env file in your repo.

  10. Use the twitter NPM docs to create an auth object that contains all the API keys you stored in your environment variables, and initialize the Twitter client with that auth object.

  11. Write sendTweet function. Have it send a tweet using the Twitter API statuses/update endpoint!

  12. Fill in your Express handler for POST requests to /tweet so that it...

    • gets the tweet text from the public/tweets/index.html form (Hint: the variable name of the form tweet text is tweet)
    • posts a Tweet with that text
    • only sends the Tweet and returns 200 OK if the tweet is at least 3 characters long
    • (challenge) redirects to the Twitter bot http://twitter.com/bog_bot

You're done! You've built the Twitter bot.