Twitter-To-Emailscreen

Publish tweets to the studio email screen

Installation instructions

1. Install python-twitter dependency

First off, you need to install the python-twitter library
pip install python-twitter

Then, clone this repo to pick up the main python routine (getTweets.py)

2. Create config files containing secrets

Then, you'll need the two config files t.py and e.py. These contain secrets for Twitter and Email integration respectively. Should you need to recreate them, the format of t.py is:

ACCESS_TOKEN_KEY = "xxx"
ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET = "xxx"
CONSUMER_KEY = "xxx"
CONSUMER_SECRET = "xxx"

Note, you can regenerate these keys from developer.twitter.com but you must be logged in as @cambridge105 to do it - otherwise your personal mentions will end up on the studio screens as they are locked to the authenticated user!

The format of e.py is:

EMAIL_HOST = "mail.cambridge105.fm" 
EMAIL_PORT = "465"
EMAIL_USER = "xxx"
EMAIL_PASSWORD = "xxx"

You can get credentials for this from Steve.

3. Create config file containing the last tweets that were already sent to the screen

The final file you need is lastTweetId.py This stores the IDs of the last tweets, which ensures we don't duplicate tweets between runs. The format of the file is:

LAST_ID_SKY = 123456789123456789
LAST_ID_105 = 123456789123456789
LAST_ID_105_MENTIONS = 123456789123456789
LAST_ID_IRN = 123456789123456789

You can look at tweet URLs on the twitter website to work out where you want to start from if you need to recreate this.

4. Update the file paths in the code

In getTweets.py you will need to update the path to the place where the file is running, both in the sys.path.append() line near the top and the file write line near the bottom.

5. Create a cronjob

Finally, set it to run in a cronjob. Beware - our not-for-profit plan allows us 15 API calls per 15 minutes it appears. Each run of the file is 4 API calls, so we shouldn't run it more than every 5 minutes. */5 * * * * /usr/bin/python /path/to/getTweets.py The script prints emailed tweets to stdout for debugging, so you may wish to redirect that to /dev/null