itstucson-bot

Highlighting misspellings of Tucson, AZ, one embarrassing tweet at a time.

Introduction

Simple bot which uses the Twitter Search API to find occurrences of Tucson being misspelled as Tuscon. Uses a scheduled Firebase Function to run the search at regular intervals and then retweets any matches. The id of the most recently retweeted match is persisted to the RealTime database to prevent duplicate tweets.

Further reading:

• Firebase SDK for Cloud Functions
• Twitter Standard Search API

Functions code

See file functions/index.js for the code.

The dependencies are listed in functions/package.json.

Initial setup

Clone this repo

• Clone or download this repo and open the itstucson-bot directory.

Create a Firebase project

• Create a Firebase Project using the Firebase Developer Console
• Enable billing on your project by switching to the Blaze or Flame plan. See pricing for more details. This is required to allow requests to non-Google services within the Function.
• Install Firebase CLI Tools if you have not already, and log in with firebase login.
• Configure this sample to use your project using firebase use --add and select your project.

Install dependencies and add environment variables

• Install dependencies locally by running: cd functions; npm i; cd -
• Add your Twitter API credentials to the Firebase config:

  firebase functions:config:set \
  twitter.consumer_key=<YOUR TWITTER CONSUMER KEY> \
  twitter.consumer_secret=<YOUR TWITTER CONSUMER SECRET> \
  twitter.access_token=<YOUR TWITTER ACCESS TOKEN> \
  twitter.access_token_secret=<YOUR TWITTER ACCESS TOKEN SECRET> \

Modify function

There are a number of variables which can be customized within the function:

• keyword - set the correct and incorrect spellings of your target keyword
• query - any additional search filters you would like to include in the query
• interjections - an array of interjections that are randomly used when retweeting matches

The function will also look for an ignore object in the RealTime database containing an array of terms which, if matched, will cause the tweet to be ignored.

Deploy the app to production

• Deploy your function using firebase deploy --only functions
• By default, the function will be run every 15 minutes