Georgia Tech Library retroTECH Twitter Bot

The Georgia Tech Library's retroTECH lab specializes in collecting vintage technologies. One collecting area has been vintage video game consoles. This Twitter bot tweets weekly an image of a game from this collection with a link to a playable emulated version from the Internet Archive's Console Living Room.

Logic

The bot composes its tweets using the data provided by data.json:

1. The bot requests the image provided by data.tweets[0].smartechUrl and downloads the image locally in ./images/image.png.
2. It then compiles a tweet with all the info from data.tweets[0].
3. After tweet is sent, data.tweets[0] is deleted. This moves data.tweets[1] up and removes the need from having to loop through the data. dataMain.json is left untouched so there is a record to use if the bot crashes.
4. ./images/image.png is also deleted.
5. The bot then waits a specified amount of time before tweeting again using node-cron.

Deploy

Install and Run

1. git clone https://github.com/PoorBillyPilgrim/gtlibrary-retrotech-twitterbot.git
2. Twitter's API requires API secrets and tokens created in a Twitter developer account. Store yours in an .env file in the project directory.
3. Install dependencies: cd gtlibrary-retrotech-twitterbot then run npm install or yarn install.
4. Start bot: node index

Manage Process

Instead of simply running node index, you can use process managers to restart your bot on a server reboot. I have used pm2 and systemd service units. I self host two projects on Ubuntu servers and have had luck using Ubuntu's service units. A very simple example:

1. Create service unit: sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/twitterbot.service

[Unit]
Description=retroTECH Twitter bot

[Service]
WorkingDirectory=/home/gtlibrary-retrotech-twitterbot
# ExecStart starts project (it's relative to WorkingDirectory)
ExecStart=/usr/bin/node index.js
# if process crashes, it will always try to restart
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

2. Run service:

• sudo systemctl daemon-reload
• sudo systemctl enable twitterbot
• sudo systemctl start twitterbot

3. Check that it is running:

• sudo systemctl status twitterbot

Credits

An excellent article found in code4lib Issue 48 by Meredith Hale of the University of Tennessee spurred me to create a Twitter Bot.

Scott Carlson at Arizona State University was an immense help and resource.

License

MIT License © Tyler Jones