Ruby on Rails: twitter integration

Monday, December 13, 2010

twitter integration

Note

The Twitter gem supports OAuth and HTTP Auth (until Twitter deprecates it). OAuth is scary at first, but not once you try it out a little bit. Feel free to read my article on OAuth to get past the scary part. Also, I have created an example app that uses OAuth and the Twitter gem for you to peruse.

Install

$ sudo gem install twitter

Examples

First some OAuth action:

# NOT SHOWN: granting access to twitter on website
# and using request token to generate access token
oauth = Twitter::OAuth.new('consumer token', 'consumer secret')
oauth.authorize_from_access('access token', 'access secret')

client = Twitter::Base.new(oauth)
client.friends_timeline.each  { |tweet| puts tweet.inspect }
client.user_timeline.each     { |tweet| puts tweet.inspect }
client.replies.each           { |tweet| puts tweet.inspect }

client.update('Heeeyyyyoooo from Twitter Gem!')

Now some HTTP Auth action:

httpauth = Twitter::HTTPAuth.new('username', 'password')

client = Twitter::Base.new(httpauth)
client.update('Heeeeyyyyooo from the Twitter Gem')
client.friends_timeline.each { |tweet| puts tweet.text }

Search API Examples

#searches all tweets for httparty
Twitter::Search.new('httparty').each do |r| 
  puts r.inspect
end

# searches all of jnunemaker's tweets for httparty
Twitter::Search.new('httparty').from('jnunemaker').each do |r| 
  puts r.inspect
end

# searches all tweets from jnunemaker to oaknd1
Twitter::Search.new.from('jnunemaker').to('oaknd1').each do |r| 
  puts r.inspect
end

# you can also use fetch to actually just get the parsed response
Twitter::Search.new.from('jnunemaker').to('oaknd1').fetch()

Trends API Examples

Twitter::Trends.current
Twitter::Trends.current(:exclude => 'hashtags')

Twitter::Trends.daily # current day
Twitter::Trends.daily(:exclude => 'hashtags')
Twitter::Trends.daily(:date => Date.new(2009, 5, 1))

Twitter::Trends.weekly # current day
Twitter::Trends.weekly(:exclude => 'hashtags')
Twitter::Trends.weekly(:date => Date.new(2009, 5, 1))

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