By Sangeeth Saravanaraj

TweetSO is an automated Python program which uses StackExchange APIs to retrieve the latest unanswered/featured questions from StackOverflow on a particular topic/tags (like C, C++, C#, JavaScript, Hadoop, etc) and tweets the questions using Twitter APIs to various Twitter handles.

• Latest Python (> 2.7 preferred)

sudo pip install simplejson
sudo pip install tinyurl
sudo pip install apscheduler
sudo pip install oauth2

Advanced Python Scheduler (APScheduler) is a light but powerful in-process task scheduler that lets you schedule functions (or any other Python callables) to be executed at times of your choosing. TweetSO uses APScheduler to schedule the invocation of StackExchange APIs to retrieve questions. Further details on APScheduler can be found here

The StackExchange.com provides APIs to add/delete/modify/view questions/answers/comments/users/badges/.. etc for sites like StackOverflow (and many more). TweetSO/stackexchange.py::StackExchange: is the class that is responsible for composing the api.stackexchange.com URL with various parameters like fromdate, todate, tags, filters, pagesize, site, etc and to retrieve the recent-unanswered and featured questions from StackOverflow for various tags like C, C++, C#, JavaScript, Hadoop, etc. The api.stackexchange.com is a public URL and so no registration is required.

TweetSO/twitter.py is responsible for composing the Twitter API URL with data (questions fetched using StackExchange APIs) and tweet them to a given Twitter handle. In order to tweet a question, you need a Twitter account. Go to Twitter and sign-up. Once after acquring a registered Twitter handle, we need to register a Twitter App. So go to Twitter Dev and click sign-in (top-right corner); enter username and password of your Twitter account. Once logged-in, click/mouse-over your account name (top-right corner where sign-in used to be) and in the drop down list, click My applications, then click Create a new application. Enter Name, Description, Website, then click Create your twitter application. Once your application is created, [Now comes the important part], you need to generate the following: Consumer key, Consumer secret, Access token and Access token secret. Note down the values for these four parameters. They are important. Do not share them with anyone. Apart from that you must ensure that the Access level is Read, write, and direct messages. This is all you need from Twitter!

Firstly, clone TweetSO using the following command:

git clone git@github.com:sangeeths/TweetSO.git

There will be no changes required in TweetSO/stackexchange.py and TweetSO/twitter.py. All we need to do is to update TweetSO/stackexchange.py

By default, TweetSO/stackexchange.py is configured to peridocally tweet unanswered/featured questions on various topics like C, C++, C#, JavaScript and Hadoop. You can comment/remove them all.

In order to configure TweetSO, you need to address three parts.

Firstly, create your new function. For example: def TweetUnAnsweredXXXXXXQuestions():

Use scheduler variable to schedule any functions. As of now, TweetSO uses cron scheduling. You are free to use other scheduling functions like add_data_job(), add_interval_job(), etc.

s = StackExchange()
todate = int(time.time())
fromdate = todate - 1200        # last 1-hour
questions = s.get_noanswered_questions(tagged='XXXXX',
                                       fromdate=fromdate,
                                       todate=todate,
#                                      Any other arguments goes here  
                                       pagesize=15)

_tweet('TwitterHandle', questions, 'PREFIX')

When a twitter handle (for example: XXX) is passed to _tweet(), the TweetSO/twitter.py::Twitter expects a ~/.XXX file present with the following contents:

consumer_key        :   <consumer-key>
consumer_secret     :   <consumer-secret>
access_token_key    :   <access-token-key>
access_token_secret :   <access-token-secret>

Consumer key, Consumer secret, Access token and Access token secret are the parameters that you must have got when you registered and configured the Twitter App. Please add the details here. And, you are ALL set!

Thanks for trying TweetSO.

Please drop in an email to sangeeth.saravanaraj@gmail.com for comments and feedback.

(c) TweetSO