zulip/templates/zerver/integrations/twitter.md

See Twitter search results in Zulip! This is great for seeing and discussing who is talking about you, friends, competitors, or important topics in real time.

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This bot should be set up on a trusted machine, because your API key is visible to local users through the command line or config file.

Next, install version 1.0 or later of the twitter-python library. If your operating system distribution doesn’t package a new enough version, you can install the library from source from the GitHub repository.

Next, set up Twitter authentication. This bot uses OAuth to authenticate with Twitter, and in order to obtain a consumer key & secret, you must register a new application under your Twitter account:

1. Log in to http://dev.twitter.com.

2. In the menu under your username, click My Applications. From this page, create a new application.

3. Click on the application you created and click create my access token. Fill in the requested values.

To configure and deploy this bot:

1. Create a ~/.zulip_twitterrc with the following contents:

   [twitter]
   consumer_key =
   consumer_secret =
   access_token_key =
   access_token_secret =
   

2. Test the script by running it manually:

   /usr/local/share/zulip/integrations/twitter/twitter-search-bot --search="@nprnews,quantum
   physics" --site={{ external_api_uri_subdomain }}
   

   Note: twitter-search-bot may install to a different location on your operating system distribution.

3. Configure a crontab entry for this script. A sample crontab entry that will process tweets every minute is:

   * * * * * /usr/local/share/zulip/integrations/twitter/twitter-search-bot
   --search="@nprnews,quantum physics" --site={{ external_api_uri_subdomain }}
   

When someone tweets a message containing one of your search terms, you’ll get a Zulip on your specified stream, with the search term as the topic.

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Note that the Twitter search bot integration just sends links to tweets; the pretty inline previews of tweets are generated by the Twitter card rendering integration configured in /etc/zulip/settings.py on the Zulip server.