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https://github.com/saasify-sh/twitter-flock
Simple & robust workflow automations for Twitter.
https://github.com/saasify-sh/twitter-flock
automation followers-twitter saasify twitter twitter-api workflow
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Simple & robust workflow automations for Twitter.
- Host: GitHub
- URL: https://github.com/saasify-sh/twitter-flock
- Owner: saasify-sh
- Created: 2020-06-15T05:32:57.000Z (over 4 years ago)
- Default Branch: master
- Last Pushed: 2023-01-07T19:08:31.000Z (almost 2 years ago)
- Last Synced: 2023-03-09T15:15:40.857Z (almost 2 years ago)
- Topics: automation, followers-twitter, saasify, twitter, twitter-api, workflow
- Language: JavaScript
- Homepage:
- Size: 5.44 MB
- Stars: 15
- Watchers: 4
- Forks: 3
- Open Issues: 15
-
Metadata Files:
- Readme: readme.md
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README
# Twitter Flock
> Simple & robust workflows to export your flock of followers from Twitter.
[](https://travis-ci.com/saasify-sh/twitter-flock) [](https://standardjs.com)
## How it works
All automations are built around Twitter OAuth which gives us higher rate limits and access to private user actions like tweeting and sending DMs.
### BatchJob
The core automation functionality is built around the [BatchJob](./lib/batch-job.js) class.
The goal of `BatchJob` is to ensure that potentially large batches of Twitter API calls are **serializable** and **resumable**.
A `BatchJob` stores all of the state it would need to continue resolving its async batched operation in the event of an error. `BatchJob` instances support serializing their state in order to store them in a database of JSON file on disk.
Here's an example batch job in action:
```js
// fetches the user ids for all of your followers
const job = BatchJobFactory.createBatchJobTwitterGetFollowers({
params: {
// assumes that you already have user oauth credentials
accessToken: twitterAccessToken,
accessTokenSecret: twitterAccessTokenSecret,
// only fetch your first 10 followers for testing purposes
maxLimit: 10,
count: 10
}
})
// process as much of this job as possible until it either completes or errors
await job.run()
// job.status: 'active' | 'done' | 'error'
// job.results: string[]
console.log(job.status, job.results)
// store this job to disk
fs.writeFileSync('out.json', job.serialize())
// ...
// read the job from disk and resume processing
const jobData = fs.readFileSync('out.json')
const job = BatchJobFactory.deserialize(jobData)
if (job.status === 'active') {
await job.run()
}
```
This example also shows how to serialize and resume a job.
### Workflow
Sequences of `BatchJob` instances can be connected together to form a [Workflow](./lib/workflow.js).
Here's an example workflow:
```js
const job = new Workflow({
params: {
// assumes that you already have user oauth credentials
accessToken: twitterAccessToken,
accessTokenSecret: twitterAccessTokenSecret,
pipeline: [
{
type: 'twitter:get-followers',
label: 'followers',
params: {
// only fetch your first 10 followers for testing purposes
maxLimit: 10,
count: 10
}
},
{
type: 'twitter:lookup-users',
label: 'users',
connect: {
// connect the output of the first job to the `userIds` param for this job
userIds: 'followers'
},
transforms: ['sort-users-by-fuzzy-popularity']
},
{
type: 'twitter:send-direct-messages',
connect: {
// connect the output of the second job to the `users` param for this job
users: 'users'
},
params: {
// handlebars template with access to the current twitter user object
template: `Hey @{{user.screen_name}}, I'm testing an open source Twitter automation tool and you happen to be my one and only lucky test user.\n\nSorry for the spam. https://github.com/saasify-sh/twitter-flock`
}
}
]
}
})
await job.run()
```
This workflow is comprised of three jobs:
- `twitter:get-followers` - Fetches the user ids of all of your followers.
- Batches twitter API calls to [twitter followers/ids](https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/accounts-and-users/follow-search-get-users/api-reference/get-followers-ids)
- `twitter:lookup-users` - Expands these user ids into user objects.
- Batches twitter API calls to [users/lookup](https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/accounts-and-users/follow-search-get-users/api-reference/get-users-lookup)
- `twitter:send-direct-messages` - Sends a template-based direct message to each of these users.
- Batches twitter API calls to [direct_messages/events/new](https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/direct-messages/sending-and-receiving/api-reference/new-event)
Note that `Workflow` derives from `BatchJob`, so workflows are also serializable and resumable. Huzzah!
## Future work
A more robust, scalable version of this project would use a solution like [Apache Kafka](https://kafka.apache.org). [Kafka.js](https://kafka.js.org) looks useful as a higher-level Node.js wrapper.
Kafka would add quite a bit of complexity, but it would also handle a lot of details and be significantly more efficient. In particular, Kafka would solve the producer / consumer model, give us more robust error handling, horizontal scalability, storing and committing state, and enable easy interop with different data sources and sinks.
This project was meant as a quick prototype, however, and our relatively simple `BatchJob` abstraction works pretty well all things considered.
### Producer / Consumer
One of the disadvantages of the current design is that a `BatchJob` needs to complete before any dependent jobs can run, whereas we'd really like to model this as a [Producer-Consumer problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Producer%E2%80%93consumer_problem).
### DAGs
Another shortcoming of the current design is that `Workflows` can only combine sequences of jobs where the output of one job feeds into the input of the next job.
A more extensible design would allow for workflows comprised of [directed acyclic graphs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_acyclic_graph).
## MVP TODO
- [x] resumable batch jobs
- [x] resumable workflows (sequences of batch jobs)
- [x] twitter:get-followers batch job
- [x] twitter:lookup-users batch job
- [x] twitter:send-direct-messages batch job
- [x] test workflow which combines these three batch jobs
- [x] test rate limits
- twitter:get-followers 75k / 15 min
- twitter:lookup-users 90k / 15 min
- twitter:send-direct-messages 1k / day
- twitter:send-tweets 300 / 3h -> 2.4k / day
- [x] large account test
- [x] gracefully handle twitter rate limits
- [x] experiment with extracting public emails
- [x] add default persistent storage
- via [leveldb](https://github.com/Level/level)
- [x] support commiting batch job updates
- [x] user-friendly cli
- [x] add cli support for different output formats
- via [sheetjs/xlsx](https://github.com/SheetJS/sheetjs#supported-output-formats)
- json, csv, xls, xlsx, html, txt, etc
- [x] gracefully handle process exit
- [ ] initial set of cli commands
- [ ] cli oauth support
- [ ] unit tests for snapshotting, serializing, deserializing
- [ ] unit tests for workflows
- [ ] convert transforms to batchjob
- [ ] more dynamic rate limit handling
- [ ] support bring-your-own-api-key
- [ ] basic docs and demo video
- [ ] hosted saasify version
## License
MIT © [Saasify](https://saasify.sh)
Support my OSS work by following me on twitter 