title	Tweet Hackernews Bot
layout	post
date	2018-01-19
image	/assets/images/markdown.jpg
headerImage	false
tag	hackBot twitter tweepy hackernews python hackerNews API
category	blog
author	[email protected]
description	Just wanted to blog about the application I developed over the weekend to extract the news from the hackernews and post it as the tweet on your twitter account.

HackBot :

This bot is all about getting the interesting news from the hackernews and posting it to your twitter account every 12 hours. Using this bot I searched the "github repository" related news on hackernews and post it on twitter. The current program will run every 12 hours posting a tweet on my account.

To start with this application you will need the basic python knowledge.

Before starting the development of the this application you will need to create a demo application using your twitter developer account.

Fill up all the details required by twitter to create the demo application. After creating the demo application you will be provided with different keys and the tokens.

Keep these things handy:

• Consumer Key (API Key)
• Consumer Secret (API Secret)
• Access Token
• Access Token Secret

All the keys mentioned above will be used to access the twitter api. Create your own workspace and install the python libraries mentioned below.

• install tweepy
• install haxor

##Code

Below method uses the in-built functions from the haxor lib to invoke the HackerNews() api. You can find more info at the haxor link mentioned above. During the program first "for loop" extract the story ids (top 100 stories) and add it to the list, using these story ids we extract the required data to be used.

      def getNews():
    
        hn = HackerNews()
        story_id=[]
        items_list=[]
    
    
        #add the stories ids
        for stories in hn.top_stories(limit=100):
            story_id.append(stories)
    
    
        #get the ids and exrtact the useful information out of it
        for ids in story_id:
            items_list.append(hn.get_item(ids))
    
    
        return items_list      

Below code uses the different keys and tokens to establish a secure access with the twitter API. Once you get the access you can invoke different actions based on the API.

    import tweepy
    import ExtractHackerNews
    import time
    
    consumer_key ='XXXXXXXXX'
    consumer_secret='XXXXXXXXX'
    access_token='XXXXXXXXX'
    access_token_secret='XXXXXXXXX'
    auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(consumer_key, consumer_secret)
    auth.set_access_token(access_token, access_token_secret)
    

    
    api = tweepy.API(auth)

Below section fetches different stories from hackernews. It will pick the stories containing the "github" keyword in the url and post it to twitter account using api.update_status(). You will be able to see post from the hackernews updated to twitter.

This code has the sleep time of 12 hours. After every 12 hours you will find a new post on your twitter personal page.

    news=[]
    status=''
    url_link=''
    
    
    
    
    while True:
        for res in ExtractHackerNews.getNews():
    
            if res.url is not None:
                if "github" in res.url.lower():
                    status = res.title
                    url_link = res.url
                    break
    
    
    
        api.update_status(status=status+'\n'+'- feed from HackerNews'+'\n'+url_link)
    
    
        print 'tweet successfully posted'
        
        time.sleep(12*60*60)

Enjoy !

Use the api for twitter and hackernews for the learning purpose. Using it for scraping is all at your own risk.