Create a Free Twitter Bot - hosted on Heroku

2014-10-23

I decided to make a Twitter Bot hosted on Heroku. And I managed to do it really easily. Surprisingly. The source code for this is on Github.

Here are the basic steps I took:

1. Think of something funny / useful for your bot to do.

This is the hard part…

2. Register a new Twitter Account

3. Create a new Twitter ‘app’ - go to http://dev.twitter.com/apps

This will have the ability to control your twitter account on your behalf.
Make a note of the API keys.

4. Enable Read / Write Permissions for this App

Found under ‘Permissions’.
If you need an extra mobile number, try this trick.

5. Write some code which interacts with the Twitter API.

Sferik’s twitter gem makes this very easy in Ruby.
If you’re looking for inspiration, browse my code. It’s not very complicated… And the twitter gem is very well documented.
Remember to use Environmental Variables to hide your API keys.

6. Create a Gemfile / Rakefile for Heroku to latch onto.

Again, examples of these can be found on my Github profile.
The rakefile basically defines an isolated process that can be run by heroku.
The Gemfile lists all the Gems you’ll need to install.
You may need to run bundle install (as usual…)

7. Check you can do what you want from the command line.

By running your rake task.

8. Create a new Heroku App.

9. Push your current files to Heroku.

This should be a .rb file, a Rakefile, a Gemfile & a Gemfile.lock

10. Add Heroku Scheduler to your Heroku app

heroku addons:add scheduler - the fastest way to add this.
This will allow you to customise how often it runs.
You can set it to run every 10 minutes if you feel the need…
To customise this, you’ll need to log into you Heroku Account.

11. Add your Environmental Variables to Heroku.

You should be ready to take Twitter by storm now!

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