Rest Poll Twitter
Description
Rest Poll Twitter is a crude library written in Bash which will enable you to get the n most recent updates from a given Twitter account.
I wrote this as a module for another project, and I've uploaded it to my GitHub account for prosperity. Could be useful if you've a dirty bash script that needs to hit Twitter for something.
Dependancies
You will need both the TCL Shell (tclshell), the perl command installed as well as cURL.
You will also need a Twitter account you can use to authorise requests. To learn how to produce a signature click here. You can read more about producing a request here if you're interested to know how things are supposed to work under the hood and what steps this script is trying to achieve.
Usage
You will need to specify a configuration file with the credentials for a valid Twitter account. Your config file should look exactly like this:
Rest__consumer_key='<your_consumer_key>'
Rest__consumer_secret='<your_consumer_secret>'
Rest__access_token='<your_access_token>'
Rest__access_token_secret='<your_access_token_secret>'
In your own script, if you wanted to retrieve the latest Tweet from my Twitter account, you'd do something like this:
# Step 1: Source the library
source "<path_to_library>/rest_poll_twitter.sh"
# Step 2: Initialise the module
# (only needs to be done once)
Rest__init "<location_of_your_config_file>.conf"
# Step 3: Initialise a new request
# (needs to be done once for each request, even if a request fails)
Rest__initialise_request
# Step 4: Add some arguments
# If the below were the end of a URL, it would look like:
# ?count=1&exclude_replies=false&include_rts=true&screen_name=Heliomass
Rest__add_argument 'count' '1'
Rest__add_argument 'exclude_replies' 'false'
Rest__add_argument 'include_rts' 'true'
Rest__add_argument 'screen_name' 'Heliomass'
# Set 5: Set the URL of the API we want to hit
# (in this case, user timelines)
local _api_url='https://api.twitter.com/1.1/statuses/user_timeline.json'
# Step 6: Make the request to a specified API URL, and store the response in
# a new variable _test_response
local _test_response
Rest__make_request $_api_url _test_response
# We're done! Display the results of our test.
# Print the arguments
echo $Rest__request_args
# Display the response
echo $_test_response