= IMPORTANT

THIS PROJECT IS DEAD. IT DOES NOT WORK. THE CODE IS KEPT HERE ONLY FOR HISTORIC PURPOSES.

DO NOT USE THIS PROJECT.

= Twibot Official URL: http://github.com/cjohansen/twibot/tree/master Christian Johansen (http://www.cjohansen.no) Twitter: @cjno

== Description

Twibot (pronounced like "Abbot"), is a Ruby microframework for creating Twitter bots, heavily inspired by Sinatra.

== Usage

=== Simple example

require 'twibot'

Receive messages, and tweet them publicly

message do |message, params| post_tweet message end

Respond to @replies if they come from the right crowd

reply :from => [:cjno, :irbno] do |message, params| post_reply message, "I agree" end

Listen in and log tweets

tweet do |message, params| MyApp.log_tweet(message) end

Search for tweets matching a query. The available search operators

are explained here: http://search.twitter.com/operators

search "twibot" do |message, params| # do_something end

Search for tweets with a hashtag

see: http://twitter.pbworks.com/Hashtags

Note: hashtag is just a convenience wrapper

around search. It will invoke the search

before and after filters.

hashtag "twibot" do |message, params| # do_something end

Search for tweets with one of a number of hashtags

see: http://twitter.pbworks.com/Hashtags

Note: hashtags is just an alias to hashtag

hashtags [:twibot, :ruby, "twitter4r"] do |message, params| # do_something end

Process any new followers. user_id will be

the user's Numeric id and params will always

be an empty Hash.

add_friend!(id) is a convenience wrapper around the

twitter4r friendship method. remove_friend!(id)

is also available.

follower do |user_id, params| # keep out the riff-raff... bot.add_friend!(user_id) unless user_id == 890631 end

add some set-up code that will be called

before each polling cycle. :all is the

default, so it can safely be omitted

before :all do MyApp.log("Started polling at #{Time.now}") end

the after hook for the polling cycle gets

passed the number of messages that were

processed

after :all do |message_count| MyApp.log("Finished polling at #{Time.now}. Got #{message_count} messages.") end

each action has before and after hooks available:

- follower

- message

- reply

- search

- tweet

there can be only one before and one after callback

registered for a given type. the callback block

will be called with no arguments.

Note: hashtag and hashtags are just wrappers around

search and do not have their own hooks. Use the

search hooks when using hashtag or hashtags.

before :message do MyApp.is_processing_a_message = true end

after :message do MyApp.is_processing_a_message = false end

after :follower do MyApp.log("I have another follower!") end

=== Running the bot

To run the bot, simply do:

ruby bot.rb

=== Configuration

Twibot looks for a configuration file in ./config/bot.yml. It should contain atleast:

login: twitter_login password: twitter_password

You can also pass configuration as command line arguments:

ruby bot.rb --login myaccount

...or configure with Ruby:

configure do |conf| conf.login = "my_account" do

If you don't specify login and/or password in any of these ways, Twibot will prompt you for those.

If you want to change how Twibot is configured, you can setup the bot instance manually and give it only the configuration options you want:

Create bot only with default configuration

require 'twibot' bot = Twibot::Bot.new(Twibot::Config.default)

Application here...

If you want command line arguments you can do:

require 'twibot' bot = Twibot::Bot.new(Twibot::Config.default << Twibot::CliConfig.new)

To disable the buffering of the Twibot log file, set the log_flush config option to true:

configure do |conf| conf.log_file = File.join(DAEMON_ROOT, 'log', 'twitterd.log') conf.log_level = "info" conf.log_flush = true end

=== "Routes"

Like Sinatra, and other web app frameworks, Twibot supports "routes": patterns to match incoming tweets and messages:

require 'twibot'

tweet "time :country :city" do |message,params| time = MyTimeService.lookup(params[:country], params[:city]) client.message :post, "Time is #{time} in #{params[:city]}, #{params[:country]}" end

You can have several "tweet" blocks (or "message" or "reply"). The first one to match an incoming tweet/message will handle it.

As of the upcoming 0.1.5/0.2.0, Twibot also supports regular expressions as routes:

require 'twibot'

tweet /^time ([^\s]) ([^\s])/ do |message, params| # params is an array of matches when using regexp routes time = MyTimeService.lookup(params[0], params[1]) client.message :post, "Time is #{time} in #{params[:city]}, #{params[:country]}" end

=== Working with the Twitter API

The DSL gives you access to your Twitter client instance through "client" (or "twitter"):

message do twitter.status :post, "Hello world" # Also: client.status :post, "Hello world" end

== Requirements

Twitter4r. You'll need atleast 0.3.1, which is currently only available from GitHub. Versions of Twitter4r prior to 0.3.1 does not allow for the since_id parameter to be appended to URLs to the REST API. Twibot needs these to only fetch fresh messages and tweets.

== Installation

gem install twibot

== Is it Ruby 1.9?

As of Twibot 0.1.3, yes it is! All tests pass, please give feedback from real world usage if you have trouble.

== Polling

Twitter pulled the plug on it's xmpp service last year. This means that Twibot backed bots needs to poll the Twitter service to keep up. Twitter has a request limit on 70 reqs/hour, so you should configure your bot not to make more than that, else it will fail. You can ask for your bot account to be put on the whitelist which allows you to make 20.000 reqs/hour, and shouldn't be a problem so long as your intentions are good (I think).

Twibot polls like this:

• Poll messages if any message handlers exist
• Poll tweets if any tweet or reply handlers exist
• Sleep for +interval+ seconds
• Go over again

As long as Twibot finds any messages and/or tweets, the interval stays the same (min_interval configuration switch). If nothing was found however, the interval to sleep is increased by interval_step configuration option. This happens until it reaches max_interval, where it will stay until Twibot finds anything.

== Contributors

• Dan Van Derveer (bug fixes) - http://dan.van.derveer.com/
• Ben Vandgrift (Twitter downtime error handling) - http://neovore.com/
• Jens Ohlig (warnings)
• Wilco van Duinkerken (bug fixes) - http://www.sparkboxx.com/
• Bodaniel Jeanes (configure block fix) - http://bjeanes.github.com/

== License

(The MIT License)

Copyright (c) 2009 Christian Johansen

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the 'Software'), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED 'AS IS', WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.