Your Own Twitter Bot

This page provides you with everything you need to effortlessly build and release a new Twitter bot to the world.

After this quick intro, I provide you with links to background articles on the Twitter bot framework, including one presentation of it.
 

Features

As of version 0.1.2, the micro-blog bot framework can operate on Twitter and any Twitter compatible micro-blogging service, such s Identi.ca. It handles what’s likely going to be common amongst bots on any such service:

• automated reciprocal following (friending, defriending)
• a common basic command set (about, help, shutdown),
• easily extensible command set and processing,
• processing of received messages,
• threading of replies.

The bot framework is implemented in Ruby.
 

Quick Intro

Step 1: Get the most up-to-date Twitter bot framework.

Go to the repository. Download the most recent version as a tarball. Unpack the tarball somewhere you want to develop your Twitter compatible bot in.

From here on, in the text body, I refer to it as mb-chatbot since that is what you actually get: a general micro-blogging services compatible chatbot framework. That includes Identi.ca and others, not only Twitter itself.
 

Step 2: Get the latest gems the Twitter bot framework is built atop.

Get twitter, get echoe.

$ sudo gem install twitter echoe

If you are on Debian, you would need the ruby-dev package also.

If it’s v0.4.1 of the twitter gem you get — it’s flawed. The mb-chatbot’s README file has a short & sharp howto to fix those flaws. As it’s probably irrelevant for any more recent version of the twitter gem we skip that here.

Step 3: Get an account for your bot at Twitter or Identi.ca

 

I suggest to try the bot framework on Identi.ca rather than on Twitter itself as there are restrictions built in to Twitter that look pretty eager to blacklist your IP once you cause too much traffic in a noticable short time. That will make the framework look like being at fault, though it is not. Identi.ca, on the other hand, to my knowledge, currently does not have any such restrictions.

To get the account, visit Twitter or Identi.ca (or anything compatible) and sign up for it. Do so like you’d do if you would be a usual human user. There may be CAPTCHAs involved, hence it is necessary you do it manually.
 

Step 4: Ready your bot

You do so by filling in the login data to a yaml file. Copy config/credentials/twitterbot.yaml to config/credentials/my-bot.yaml. Insert the login data to the appropriate username/password fields, and select the service to use, Twitter or Identi.ca. — The README file provides quality information on how to ready your bot for any other compatible micro-blogging service.

Step 5: Launch the demo bot

$ ruby micro_blog_bot.rb

 

Step 6: Build your own flavour of bot

To do so, open a new file, template it with

main_dir = File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), '')
require (main_dir + 'micro_blog_bot')

class MyBot < MicroBlogBot
  ...
end

Essentially, you are now ready to reuse what MicroBlogBot already provides and overwrite it where you’d need alternative functionality. Mainly this will be the answer_message method to be overwritten, or the @bot_commands hash to be extended.
 

Background articles on the Twitter bot framework

These are some other postings on the micro-blog bot framework I released to my blog:

• presentation on a Twitter/Identi.ca bot framework
• Chatbots for Twitter/Identi.ca: A mini-framework in Ruby
• lessons learned from the Twitter/Identi.ca bot development
• Develop your own Twitter bot? — Don’t.