Learn Bower, Jq and Twit

In this course we’ll learn how to create Twitter bots. We’ll first learn how to interface with the Twitter API using Twit.js, which allows us to post statuses, search tweets, and interact with followers. We’ll create several example bots that show the diversity of possibilities, using powerful tools such as RiTa.js, Google’s Cloud Vision API, and Tracery. We’ll learn how to tweet data from Google Spreadsheets, and to compose and tweet a song for an audio bot. We’ll also learn how to host our bot logic on Heroku and Docker. 

Twitter API Client for node

Supports both the REST and Streaming API.

twit

Create your own twitter bots

jq is a lightweight and flexible command-line JSON processor.

jq can help you quickly filter massive amounts of JSON data, but how can you turn it into a CSV, so you can process it quickly with a database or spreadsheet application?

This lesson shows how to select the data you want for your CSV with jq, and uses the helper utility linked below to output as CSV.

https://github.com/joelpurra/jq-hopkok/tree/master/src/tabular

Convert JSON to CSV with jq

We’ll get a real-time stream of tweets, and learn how to filter a stream by keyword, location, and user.

Use the Twitter Stream API with Twit.js

jq is a lightweight and flexible command-line JSON processor. It is extremely useful for processing data from APIs to better understand the data your code will be consuming, before you write the code. In this lesson I introduce you to jq and show you the basic features it provides using the Star Wars API (http://swapi.co) as our data source. Topics covered include filtering, piping, object construction and data manipulation.

Using jq to parse the Star Wars API

In this lesson, our bot will tweet hello to the Twitter world! We'll do this by using Twit's POST method to post our status to the statuses/update endpoint.

Post Statuses with Twit.js

In this lesson, we’ll create multiple functions to request, download, and save photos and data from NASA's API, and then have our bot upload these photos to Twitter and post them along with their descriptions. We'll also learn how to tweet videos using a video from NASA’s space archives.

Tweet Media Files with Twit.js

We’ll learn how your bot can get its list of followers, follow people, and look up friendships. We'll use Twit's GET method to get our followers at the followers/list endpoint, to get the users we follow at the friends/ids and friends/list endpoints, and to look up our friendships with the friendships/lookup endpoint. We'll also use Twit's POST method to follow someone at the friendships/create endpoint, and to send messages by posting to the direct_messages/new endpoint. 

Work with Users in Twit.js

We’ll learn the basics of interacting with tweets, including retweeting, deleting, favoriting, and replying to tweets. We'll get our home timeline by using Twit's GET method to access the `statuses/home_timeline` endpoint, including the count parameter, which lets us get back a certain number of tweets. We'll also pass it a callback. We'll learn how to cycle through the data (the tweets) we get back and see what information is included. We'll learn how to retweet statuses by posting to `statuses/retweet` and including the tweet id. We can unretweet by posting to `statuses/unretweet` with the same tweet id. We'll also learn how to like a tweet by posting to `favorites/create` with a tweet id, and unlike a tweet by posting to `favorites/destroy` with a tweet id. We'll also learn how to reply to a tweet by posting to `statuses/update`, with a status that includes the handle of the user we're replying to and `in_reply_to_status_id` parameter, which is the id of the tweet we're replying to. We'll learn how to delete a tweet by posting to `statuses/destroy` with the tweet's id. 

Interact with Tweets with Twit.js 

We’ll learn how to search tweets with the Twitter Search API, using Twit's GET method to get the search/tweets endpoint. We'll use the query and count parameters to get the search term(s) and number of tweets that we want. We'll learn how to get exact phrases, multiple words, one of several words, emoticons, hashtags, photos/videos, urls, and how to remove words from our results. We'll learn how to implement the safe filter and how to filter by media, website, or date. We'll learn how to get recent results, popular results, results by location, and results by language. 

The search API returns for relevance, and not completeness. If you want all the tweets from a search term, you should use the stream API (which we'll go over in the next lesson). 

Use the Twitter Search API with Twit.js

We’ll go over the basic Twitter bot setup, including how to start a project from scratch, install necessary packages, and store our private keys in environment variables. 

Set Up a Basic Twitter Bot with Twit.js

bower

Bower is a package manager for Javascript libraries that allows you to define, version, and retrieve your dependencies. In this tutorial, John gives a quick introduction to Bower and will show you how to get started.

Introduction to Bower

Bash, unfortunately, doesn’t ship with a command that can work with JSON natively. In this lesson, we’ll learn how to read and do basic queries on JSON with `jq`, an installable command line tool that makes working with JSON in bash really easy. We'll pipe the JSON output of the Github API to jq to extract values. 

Note: jq has to be installed. On macOS, the easiest way to do this is to run `brew install jq`.  To view install instructions for all platforms, see https://stedolan.github.io/jq/download/. 

Read and Use JSON in Bash with jq

In this lesson, we'll apply our `jq` skills and write a script that gets a list of dependencies from package.json and greps for usages of every package. If a package is unused, it's marked for removal. 

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