Twitter Bot Schedule

We finished out the core functionality of our Twitter Bot in our last post. But we needed a way to have our bot run and only attempt to tweet once or twice a day. If we look on how much I post which is about once a week, but I have done one off post through out the week. For my needs running once a day at a specific time should be enough. The easiest way to do this is with a library. For this we are going to use schedule a scheduling library written by Dan Bader. This is super easy to use and we are not re-inventing the wheel. To add it to our project we run the following command:

pip install schedule

Let’s now modify the bot.py add in schedule and time libraries but also clean up our other from statements:

from posts import get_todays_post
from tweets import see_if_tweet_exist, tweet_latest_post
import schedule
import time

In the original write up we had our import section looking something like this:

from posts import *
from tweets import *

Yes this works, but we didn’t need everything from those files so we wanted to narrow it down to what we only need. Now we can rework the def main(): and add in a new method called def run_new_post():. The functionality we had in def main(): we need to move to def run_new_post()::

def main():
    post = get_todays_post()
    if post.link:
        if not see_if_tweet_exist(post.link):
            tweet_latest_post(post)

To something like this:

def main():
    run_new_post()


def run_new_post():
    print('start')
    post = get_todays_post()
    if post.link:
        if not see_if_tweet_exist(post.link):
            tweet_latest_post(post)
    print('end')

This gives us the ability to add in schedule to our def main(): I also added in some print() so when this runs we can see it as an output. Now to add in schedule:

def main():
    schedule.every().day.at("09:00").do(run_new_post)

    while True:
        schedule.run_pending()
        time.sleep(1)

This will have our app run, but it will only attempt to tweet a new post only at 9 o’clock. This was a quick and easy update to our app gives us the right structure to have it deployed and running somewhere that isn’t my laptop. I keep my work in this GitHub repo.