tbot

Ask Ubuntu Chat Twitter Bot

A small web application that watches the Ask Ubuntu general room for messages that meet a certain criteria and allows them to be tweeted at regular intervals. Some of the features include:

• Customize criteria for discovering "relevant" messages
• Hand-select messages for tweeting
• Allow multiple users to manage tweets
• Send custom messages from the Twitter account
• Queue messages for tweeting at regular intervals

Due to its lengthy name, the app has been nicknamed "tbot".

Screenshots

You can see the application in action here: https://tbot.quickmediasolutions.com

Home page displaying a single tweet

Building tbot

tbot is written in the Go programming language. It will run on any platform supported by Go and compiles to a single binary. Assuming you have Go installed and configured ($GOPATH is set), you can run:

go get github.com/AskUbuntu/tbot

...and the resulting binary will be in $GOPATH/bin.

Running the Application

Configuration is split into two categories:

• Information needed to start the application (address, etc.)
• Settings that control application behavior (search terms, etc.)

The information needed to start the application is provided in a JSON file as a single argument. An example configuration is provided in config.json.default. Copy this file to config.json and customize it as necessary. Then launch the application with:

$(GOPATH)/bin/tbot config.json

Assuming the default configuration, point your browser to http://127.0.0.1:8000 and you're good to go!

Running in Docker

To run tbot in Docker, pull the askubuntu/tbot image:

docker pull askubuntu/tbot

Then run the container with:

docker \
    run \
    -d \
    -p 8000:8000 \
    --env ADMIN_PASSWORD="" \
    --env SECRET_KEY="" \
    --env TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY="" \
    --env TWITTER_CONSUMER_SECRET="" \
    --env TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN="" \
    --env TWITTER_ACCESS_SECRET="" \
    -v /data/tbot:/path/for/data \
    askubuntu/tbot

Two important things to note:

1. Each of the environment variables listed in the command above must have a valid value set.
2. To persist settings and data, mount a volume at /data/tbot.