Automating Your DMs With Nodejs

In The Last Tutorial

We created a Laravel/Vue app that allows us to automate and schedule our Twitter posts. Now we are going to add a Node.js microservice that will send an auto DM to those who follow you on Twitter. This adds a personal touch when you gain new followers and makes people more apt to pay attention to your tweets. If you don’t have the app from the last tutorial, you can download it here. Otherwise open up your terminal to the project root and let’s get started.
 

Node Script

This node script will use the twit npm module to create a Twitter stream listening to our own account. When the follow event is fired we will grab the source id of the user that sent us a follow request, after which we will send a DM to that user id with a welcome message. Let’s start by adding the twit dependency and the dotenv dependency.

npm install twit dotenv --save

Now create a new file called twitter.js and fill with the following:

require('dotenv').config()
var Twit = require('twit')
var T = new Twit({
 consumer_key: process.env.TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY,
 consumer_secret: process.env.TWITTER_CONSUMER_SECRET,
 access_token: process.env.TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN,
 access_token_secret: process.env.TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET,
 timeout_ms: 60*1000, // optional HTTP request timeout to apply to all requests.
})var stream = T.stream('user');
stream.on('connected', function(response){
 console.log('Connected!')
});
stream.on('follow',function(data){
 console.log(data.source.id);
 T.post('direct_messages/events/new',{
 "event": {
 "type": "message_create",
 "message_create": {
 "target": {
 "recipient_id": data.source.id
 },
 "message_data": {
 "text": "Thanks for the follow! Be sure to check out my blog https://jyroneparker.com",
 }
 }
 }
})});

The dotenv dependency allows us to use the same .env file to grab our Twitter app credentials that we used in our Laravel app. As you can see the stream fires on different events we just choose the follow and the connected events. Lastly we need to run the script make sure you have supervisor or some other program running it as a daemon.

node twitter.js

If you want to extend the functionality read up on the Twitter stream documentation here. Otherwise add some auto like functionality to your bot.