Learn Mongoose, 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

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

Express is a minimal and flexible Node.js web application framework that provides a robust set of features for web and mobile applications.

express

Mongoose allows you to easily select resources by ID from your MongoDB. This is an important aspect to creating an API.

Select by ID with Mongoose and Express

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

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

Learn how to setup an Nginx proxy server with Docker that sits in front of a Node.js app. You can use a proxy to control the flow of frontend requests hitting your app, as well as to achieve better performance and scalability. We'll create a sample Node.js app, configure a default Nginx configuration file for proxying web requests, build both Node.js and Nginx Docker images, and learn how to link everything up and get it running with Docker specifics.

Setup an Nginx Proxy for a Node.js App with Docker

Node.js apps built with Docker cannot scale horizontally by themselves. In this lesson we will spawn out multiple Node.js processes/containers, and move the incoming request handler to an Nginx proxy to load balance and properly scale our Node.js app.

Scale Docker Horizontally with Nginx Load Balancing

Mongoose provides a straight-forward, schema-based solution to model your application data. It includes built-in type casting, validation, query building, business logic hooks and more, out of the box.

mongoose

One of the great things about NoSQL databases is that you do not have to decide on your data schema while developing. As you get closer to production though, you'll often want to more clearly define the shape of the data you are working with.

Enforce Schemas in MongoDB using Mongoose Models

Node.js is a platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications. Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.

node

Ghost has two hard dependencies which need to be installed before it can run. Those are Nginx and Node.js.

We will start by installing Nginx and set Nginx up to control the traffic coming into the EC2 server. After this, we'll install NVM using the raw install script that they provide on GitHub. With NVM installed we can then install the latest version of Node.js
