Learn Gulp, Nginx 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

In this series we will take a look at Gulp. Gulp is a task runner. It is the commander of our army of helper robots that take critical, yet totally mundane, tasks and perform them hundreds of times per day so we don't have to. When we sit down to work, we want to enter a single command, and then spend the rest of our day writing code, testing, and basically not thinking about how it is all glued together in the background.

Automation is critical to any project of significant size. We will start with the Eggly Bookmarks application, and develop proper build automation that will include **production ready** tools that you can start using in your applications today!

AngularJS is an open-source JavaScript framework, maintained by Google, that assists with running single-page applications. Its goal is to augment web-based applications with model–view–controller (MVC) capability, in an effort to make both development and testing easier.

angularjs

Angular Automation with Gulp

In this lesson, we are going to learn how to create a config file to store common values so that we can reuse them multiple times in our `gulpfile.js`. As our `gulpfile.js` grows in complexity, we may find that we are introducing complex and multiple file path references. By creating a `gulp.config.js` file, we can simplify these references and make it easier to refactor and extend in the future. 

Angular Automation: Gulp Config

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

In this lesson, we are going to learn how to use `gulp.watch` to detect local file changes and execute additional Gulp tasks. To illustrate this concept, we are also going to hook up `gulp-jshint` to automation lint our JavaScript as we make changes to our code.

Angular Automation: Gulp Watch

Angular projects require automation. Period. 

In this series we will take a look at Gulp. Gulp is a task runner. It is the commander of our army of helper robots that take critical, yet totally mundane, tasks and perform them hundreds of times per day so we don't have to. When we sit down to work, we want to enter a single command, and then spend the rest of our day writing code, testing, and basically not thinking about how it is all glued together in the background.

Automation is critical to any project of significant size. We will start with the Eggly Bookmarks application, and develop proper build automation that will include **production ready** tools that you can start using in your applications today!

Angular Automation: Introduction to Gulp

In this lesson, we are going to learn how to copy assets from one place to another using Gulp. This is important as you start to prepare your source files to be deployed into production. We will learn how to implement `gulp.src`, `gulp.pipe` and `gulp.dest` as well as the **del** plugin as we copy our files from the source directory into a build directory.

Angular Automation: Copy Assets with Gulp

In this lesson, we are going to learn how to use the `gulp-inject` plugin to sanely and efficiently manage our file references with our HTML. Manually declaring JavaScript references will quickly get out of hand as your application grows in size and complexity. The `gulp-inject` plugin solves this problem by taking a stream of files, converting them into string references and then injecting those references into your HTML via annotations. 

Angular Automation: Gulp Inject

In this lesson, we are going to learn how to automatically serve our project via an HTTP server using `gulp-serve`. Being able to serve our project from an HTTP server allows us to bypass a myriad of development issues such as loading remote source files.

Angular Automation: Gulp Serve

In this lesson, we will learn how tasks work in Gulp. We will talk about how to define a task and what each parameter in the definition does. We will see how task dependencies work and talk about how to handle asynchronous issues using `run-sequence`.

Angular Automation: Gulp Tasks

In this lesson, we learn how to get up and running with Gulp by initializing our project with ```npm init``` and then installing the Gulp CLI globally and then installing it locally to our project. We finish the lesson off by creating our first Gulp file and running our first Gulp task.

Angular Automation: Installing Gulp Globally and Locally

NGINX is a free, open-source, high-performance HTTP server and reverse proxy, as well as an IMAP/POP3 proxy server. 

nginx

Learn about the concepts of managing data within Docker volumes, including all of the commands to create and manage volumes. We'll demonstrate how to mount a Docker volume to one or many containers by creating and mounting a volume to an Nginx proxy, and then verify the output with curl. You'll also see how changes to files within volumes of one container propagate to other containers with the same volume mounted, and learn various commands to inspect Docker volumes.

Manage Data within Docker Volumes

Gulp is a toolkit for automating painful or time-consuming tasks in your development workflow, so you can stop messing around and build something.

gulp

Building upon the `watch` task that we begin this lesson with, we’ll look at how to create a local development server using the `app` directory as the web root. By using Browsersync to achieve this, we can also instruct all connected browsers to automatically reload each time our bundle is re-generated. Browsersync has a public `.stream()` method that is designed exactly for this purpose.

Gulp and Browserify - Adding Live Reload with Browsersync

Babel has support for the latest version of JavaScript through syntax transformers. These plugins allow you to use new syntax, right now without waiting for browser support.

babel

What is already a nice workflow using Gulp, Browserify, Watchify & Browsersync to enable auto rebuilds & live browser reloading can be further improved by adding Babelify. A simple wrapper around the popular transpiler Babel, Babelify can ‘transform’ source files as they pass through our stream to enable certain Javascript features not yet available in the Browser or Node. We end the lesson by looking at how to generate & extract sourcemaps using `exorcist`.

Gulp and Browserify - Adding Babel & Source Maps

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

Browserify lets you require('modules') in the browser by bundling up all of your dependencies.

browserify

Let's look at the basics of setting up Gulp and Browserify. Creating a Gulp task from scratch, we'll cover how to utilise the Browserify API to generate a single `bundle.js` file, catch and log any errors that occur in the compilation process, transform the stream into a format that can be consumed by `gulp.dest` and finish by writing the bundle to a `dist` directory.