bashtag: A Shell repository from eatmycode

`bashtag`

A simple shell script to post tweets to your timeline using Twitter's v1.1 API.

Do you live in your CLI?
Rather not switch to a browser or other device to broadcast to the world?
Wanna automate tweets of whatever gibberish via cron?

If yes to any of the above... Noice! Keep reading!

Requirements

Your Terminal

AND

PHP >= 5.3.x

OR

OpenSSL

Why PHP or OpenSSL?

Well, the signature for authorizing and posting the status update is calculated by passing the signature base string and signing key to the HMAC-SHA1 hashing algorithm. The details of the algorithm are explained in depth HERE, but thankfully there are implementations of HMAC-SHA1 available for every popular language. For example, PHP has the hash_hmac function and HMAC-SHA1 hashing can easily be generated on almost any modern Unix-like system using OpenSSL.

Hashing defaults to PHP if both are installed.
On a production webserver, typically both would already be installed (see your host if you are unsure).
If using on your local box and you dont have a l/a/n/mp stack or stand-alone PHP install or OpenSSL installed (really?), then get one of 'em.
cURL is also required and should be installed by default anyway.

A quick check:

  # Open up a linux terminal and type:

  ~$ which php openssl curl

  # If you have 1 or all 3 installed, you should see something similar to:

  ~$ which php openssl curl
  /usr/local/bin/php
  /usr/bin/openssl
  /usr/bin/curl

  # If you get nothing in return or see somthing like /usr/bin/which: no {SOFTWARE_NAME} in (/usr/local/bin:.....
  # for any of the three, then that particular program is not installed.

Configuration

The goal of bashtag is simplicity.

PAUSE

You do however need to make yourself a twitter app!

So basically, you need to:

First, go and create yourself a twitter app on the twitter developer site.
After creation, click the Settings tab, scroll down and enable read/write access for your twitter app. (This will take a min.)
Now, click the Details tab, scroll down and click Create my access token (This will also take a min.)
Lastly, click the OAuth tool tab and grab your consumer key/secret and access token/secret:

Ok, got all that?

Now, open up bashtag in your preferred editor and add your app access tokens (lines 47-50).

45        # Your Twitter application's settings.
46        # [EDIT THIS SECTION TO REFLECT YOUR TWITTER APPLICATION'S VALUES]
47    
48            app_key="YOUR_CONSUMER_KEY"
49            app_secret="YOUR_CONSUMER_SECRET"
50            access_token="YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN"
51            access_secret="YOUR_ACCESS_SECRET"

All that's left to do is to make it executable:

~$ cd /place/to/where/you/downloaded/bashtag/
~$ chmod +x bashtag

and place bashtag in your scripts, bin, or executable dir:

~$ mv bashtag /path/to/your/executable/scripts/

...or create a symlink to bashtag in your scripts, bin, or executable dir:

~$ cd /path/to/your/executable/scripts/
~$ ln -s /place/to/where/you/downloaded/bashtag ./bashtag

Done!

How To `bashtag`

Tweet It. (A tweet oneliner)

 ~$ bashtag this is pretty dope!

 #      NOTE: ONLY if using this option (Option 1. - Direct tweet), 
 #            all "hastags" must be escaped with a '\'

 ~$ bashtag \#money on my \#mind.

 #       WHY: Linux will see it as a comment and ignore everything after the first "#"
 #            * You can however drop quotes arround your tweet to avoid escaping:

 ~$ bashtag "i will not escape tweets #boss #idontwanna #2lzy"

Prompt It. (Prompts you for your message)

 ~$ bashtag
    Whatchu Tweetin' ? [140 pls]: yep this is very simple #bashery

Pipe It. (Feed bashtag the stdout from another command or series of commands)
```
 ~$ cat somefile | bashtag
```

Cron It. (Automate your tweets)

 */5 * * * * curl -s http://something.from/somewhere | bashtag > /dev/null 2>&1

Yep. Pretty awesome right?

If successful, you will see something like:

~$ bashtag Ok. I can do this. \#osohappy

   Tweeted It!

If an error occurs, it will be displayed in un-pretty JSON: o_o

~$ bashtag This is some text that is really long and not less than 140 characters. But it is something I really want to get off of my chest because it is important for me to say it!

   Error: [ {"errors":[{"code":186,"message":"Status is over 140 characters."}]} ]

Limitations

This is a simple CLI tool. Nothing real extravagant here.

It's only for "text only" tweets <= 140 characters and nothing more (at least currently).

However, it's use can be expanded upon as you wish... (Check the Twitter API docs).

I'd love to see/merge what other bashtag things you do with it.

OS's

Tested and confirmed working on:

Mac OSX 10.9.1+
CentOS 5.10+
More to come...

If working for you (or not), please feel free to drop me a line with your OS/Environment.

License

MIT License

eatmycode/bashtag

bashtag