Dashtag

Check out the example of Hashtag Displayer here on our staging site.

The hastag displayer is a light weight rails application that pulls tweets with a particular hashtag and displays them using masonry. The app is pretty much plug and play. The only changes you have to make is in the .env file.

The application uses Twitter's REST API and Instagram's REST API. Please note this is not an exhaustive list of all tweets/instagrams with a particular hashtag.

To Deploy To Heroku

Simply put the environment variables, as described below, into Heroku's dashboard after hitting the Deploy to Heroku Button above.

Environment Variables

Currently the application expects the following variables in the environment:

HASHTAG
CENSORED_WORDS
CENSORED_USERS
TWITTER_BEARER_CREDENTIALS
INSTAGRAM_CLIENT_ID
DISABLE_RETWEETS

Hashtag should be set to the text of the hashtag excluding the initial '#'. So if you wanted all of the posts with the "#peace" on Twitter, you set: HASHTAG=peace

To prevent from storing posts with certain words set the environment variable CENSORED_WORDS to the words you dont want to include in the .env file. For example, to censor posts that contain the word, "question", add the following line in the .env file:

CENSORED_WORDS=questions

If you want censor multiple words, simply delimit them with "|", like so

CENSORED_WORDS=questions|answers|censored

To prevent from storing posts from certain users set the environment variable CENSORED_USERS to the users you dont want to include in the .env file. For example, to censor posts by the author, "badGuy", add the following line in the .env file:

CENSORED_USERS=badGuy

If you want to censor multiple users, simply delimit them with "|", like so

CENSORED_USERS=badGuy|UglyDog

If you don't want to censor users or words, simply don't put CENSORED_USERS or CENSORED_WORDS in the .env file.

Twitter Bearer Credentials should be set to the Twitter Key followed by a colon and the Twitter secret, like so:

TWITTER_BEARER_CREDENTIALS=your_twitter_key:your_twitter_secret

To find the key and secret for your app follow these directions. This will require you to register your own Twitter application. Also, in case you were wondering, the application uses application-only authentication.

Instagram Client Id should be set to the client id you get back from registering your application with Instagram. Where it prompts for Website and OAuth redirect_uri: and you will need to put your site's address. You should not need to change the defaults for Disable implicit OAuth or Enforce signed header. You only need the CLIENT_ID that they give you, not the secret or anything else.

The application by default does not capture retweet posts from twitter. To capture retweets, set the DISABLE_RETWEETS, environment variable to 'false'.

To Run Locally

To set up the application locally you should first create a new file called .env in the root dir of the app. After pulling the app into a local repository on your machine, create a .env file at the root of your repository. This is where you can set environment variable that will be available to your application, but ignored by git (thanks to dotenv).

Your final .env file should look like this:

HASHTAG=peace
CENSORED_WORDS=************|wowza|more
TWITTER_BEARER_CREDENTIALS=YOUR_TWITTER_KEY:YOUR_TWITTER_SECRET
INSTAGRAM_CLIENT_ID=YOUR_INSTAGRAM_CLIENT_ID_CODE

Running the app locally

Once you have the .env file setup, run bundler from the command line:

$ bundle

create/migrate the database:

$ rake db:create && rake db:migrate

and start the server:

$ rails s

If everything worked you should be able to see the application at work at http://localhost:3000/ in your favorite browser.

Running tests

The testing framework used is Rspec and Capybara. To run them:

$ rspec

Note: Currently one feature test is pending

What's in the future?

We're working on supporting facebook and videos