Tweet Hackernews Bot

Friday. January 19, 2018 - 2 mins

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.

##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)

Source Code

Github Project HackBot Source Code

Enjoy !

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