Rackatweet - Tweets as JSON via a rack app

A very simple rack app to provide a twitter timeline as JSON.

Install

Rails

In Gemfile

gem 'rackatweet'

In routes.rb

<AppName>::Application.routes.draw do
  match "/tweets.json", :to => Rackatweet::App.new
end

OAuth

Create a twitter application at: https://dev.twitter.com/apps

Make a note of your consumer_key, consumer_secret, oauth_token, and oauth_token_secret

If you are using Rails, then create an initializer like:

if defined?(Rackatweet)
  Rackatweet::Config.consumer_key = ENV['CONSUMER_KEY']
  Rackatweet::Config.consumer_secret = ENV['CONSUMER_SECRET']
  Rackatweet::Config.oauth_token = ENV['OAUTH_TOKEN']
  Rackatweet::Config.oauth_token_secret = ENV['OAUTH_TOKEN_SECRET']
  Rackatweet::Config.timeout = ENV['TIMEOUT'] # optional - default is 10s
  Rackatweet::Config.cache_expires_in = ENV['CACHE_EXPIRES_IN'] # optional - default is 900s (15 minutes)
end

Start the rails server in development:

CONSUMER_KEY=XXX CONSUMER_SECRET=XXX OAUTH_TOKEN=XXX OAUTH_TOKEN_SECRET=XXX rails server

Or on heroku add the following config variables:

CONSUMER_KEY
CONSUMER_SECRET
OAUTH_TOKEN
OAUTH_TOKEN_SECRET

The OAUTH token should never expire. The rack app will make the access token request only once. So if you restart the server it will happen again.

Optionally set the TIMEOUT variable

TIMEOUT=10 sets the timeout to 10s when accessing the twitter API, the default is 10 (accepts float or integer value)

Optionally set the CACHE_EXPIRES_IN variable

CACHE_EXPIRES_IN=3600 sets the cache of tweets to expire in 1 hour. After 1 hour, the Twitter API will be hit again

Twitter API Params

You can use any of the twitter API params in the URL like:

GET '/tweets.json?count=2&screen_name=kev_the_dev

See: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1/get/statuses/user_timeline

Valid params:

count
user_id
screen_name
since_id
max_id
trim_user
exclude_replies
contributor_details
include_rts

Responses:

Successful response:

{
  "tweets": []
}

Error:

{
  "errors": ["message": "Error message", "code": statusCode]
}

Errors returned by the twitter API are handled as above.

There are two additional errors, SocketError & TimeoutError both with a statusCode of 500

Thanks!

To Beef the benefactors of this project.

& Jordan Elver for the idea