No creative names for you, I'm afraid. This is a script to post pre-configured threads on Twitter. You can schedule when to start the thread, and then a time offset for each tweet. It also performs basic checks for tweet length and duplicate tweets. And you can include media to be uploaded with your tweet.
You can run this script either once until the whole thread has been posted, or repeatedly, e.g. via cronjobs. You'll provide a file with the tweets to be posted, which will then be updated by the script to reflect which tweet has already been posted.
To get set up, get yourself a virtualenv of any kind, and pip install -r requirements.txt. (If this sounds like
magic to you, scroll all the way down.)
You'll need to register an app. This page has okay instructions.
Put a file called settings.py in this directory:
API_KEY = "..."
API_SECRET = "..."
ACCESS_TOKEN_KEY = "..."
ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET = "..."You'll need one JSON file per thread. Please note that the "offset" key denotes the delay between the previous and current tweet, and is a value in seconds. A file looks like this:
{
"start": "2019-09-14T20:00:00",
"tweets": [
{
"text": "Something"
},
{
"text": "Something",
"offset": 60
},
{
"text": "Tweet\nwith\nnewlines",
"offset": 3,
"media": "path/to/pic/or/video"
}
]
}The file will later be edited by the script to add sent timestamps and tweet IDs.
Check what would happen if you were to run Thread Scheduler first:
python thread_scheduler.py tweets.json --check
Or have your entire thread analyzed – this will print the post times and the length of each tweet, so that you know where you can fit in more content:
python thread_scheduler.py tweets.json --analyze
Maybe post a single tweet first (useful if you want to run this via crontab):
python thread_scheduler.py tweets.json --one-off
If you choose to run your script via one-offs, you probably want to add the --no-sleep flag, too, to prevent the
script from hanging until the next tweet is due:
python thread_scheduler.py tweets.json --one-off --no-sleep
Or just leave the script running until the thread has been posted. Will provide print output, and save progress in the JSON file, so that you can safely abort at any time:
python thread_scheduler.py tweets.json
If everything goes well, you should see helpful output like this:
python thread_scheduler.py tweets.json
Will sleep for 284 minutes, 37 seconds.
Sent out a tweet:
┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓
┃ ┃
┃ While I should have slept, I wrote a little Python ┃
┃ script: thread-scheduler. ┃
┃ https://github.com/rixx/thread-scheduler ┃
┃ ┃
┗━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┛
Sent out a tweet:
┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓
┃ ┃
┃ As its creative name suggests, it … schedules ┃
┃ threads. ┃
┃ You can write out a Twitter thread, tell it when ┃
┃ to start and how much time to leave between ┃
┃ tweets, and it will happily post away. ┃
┃ ┃
┗━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┛
Will sleep for 0 minutes, 59 seconds.
Sent out a tweet:
┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓
┃ ┃
┃ It's probably not useful for anybody except me, ┃
┃ but I'm putting it out there just in case. About a ┃
┃ hundred lines of relevant code, and that's ┃
┃ including a bunch of flags. ┃
┃ ┃
┗━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┛
All tweets have been sent!
- Open a terminal and make sure you have
python3available. - Next, clone this repository:
git clone git@github.com:rixx/thread-scheduler.git. - Go into the newly cloned repository:
cd thread-scheduler - Start a virtual environment:
python3 -m venv .venv - Activate the virtual environment:
source .venv/bin/activate. Repeat this step any time you want to use the thread scheduler. - Install the dependencies:
pip install -r requirements.txt