Simple Twitter Hashtag Monitor

For the Creative Coding Maastricht Meetup. We'll use it in a project that fires up an Arduino connected light installation everytime someone tweets something that matches #caracola. For great profit of course!

Installation

Assuming you have a *nix system, and you have ruby, rubygems, bundler and rbenv installed. Then, clone this repository and run bundle install. Now that the dependencies are taken care of, you can start the script by running bundle exec ruby twitter_hashtag_monitor.rb. Enjoy the stream! YMMV.

Twitter API keys

Go to https://apps.twitter.com/ to get yer API keys. Place them in a file called .env which you will copy from example.env by using the following command:

cp example.env .env

Usage

twitter_hashtag_monitor.rb

In the file twitter_hashtag_monitor.rb you can set the filters you'd like in the topics variable, like so:

topics = ['#coffee', '#caracola']

In the infinite loop you can plug any arbitrary code you want, e.g. to fire the Arduino.

# Infinite loop
client.filter(track: topics.join(',')) do |object|
  if object.is_a?(Twitter::Tweet)
    # It's a matching tweet! Do anything you want!

    # e.g. print the Tweet content
    puts "[#{Time.now.strftime("%F %T")}] #{object.user.name}: #{object.text}"
  end
end

More documentation available in the twitter gem that powers the script.

Then run the following to execute script:

bundle exec twitter_hashtag_monitor.rb

one_twitter_message.rb

Use this to print a limited number of twitter messages to stdout.

# Outputs 1 twitter message
bundle exec one_twitter_message.rb

# Outputs 123 twitter message
bundle exec one_twitter_message.rb 123

Thanks

Thank you Caracola for generously providing us with a place to host our meetups! We recommend anyone in the Maastricht NL area to keep a close eye on this space, because there's a ton of exciting stuff happening.