birdwatch

Birdwatch :baby_chick::watch:

Get raw tweets from one or more specific twitter feeds.

Birdwatch will help you grab tweets from specific twitter accounts, and cache the tweets on-disk and in-memory on your server, thus avoiding any request limits set by the Twitter API, and giving you more control over the data that is saved. You can filter tweets by hashtags, or ignore retweets.

Note: This is a work in progress. Pull requests welcome!

Installation

Step 1: Install the package via npm

$ npm install --save birdwatch

Step 2: Add your twitter app credentials to the configuration file

1. Open the file: node_modules/birdwatch/configure/configure.js
2. Replace the placeholder values with your twitter app credentials
3. Rename the configure.js file to local_configure.js
4. Now you are ready to birdwatch!

Note: Skipping step #3, results in error: Cannot find module './configure/local_configure.js'

Usage

var Birdwatch = require('birdwatch');

var birdwatch = new Birdwatch({refreshTime: 500})
    .feed('gulpjs')
    .feed('reactjs', {filter_tags: /#reactjs/i })
    .feed('nodejs',  {filter_tags: /#nodejs/i, remove_retweets:true  });

birdwatch.start(function (err) {
    if(err) { console.log(err); }
});

// Now get your tweets in JSON format to serve or print
birdwatch.getCachedTweets().then(function(tweetdata){
    console.log(tweetdata);
});

Features

Cached HTML Tweet

• If birdwatch can't find an html string on the returned tweet data, then it adds one for you, complete with twitter-ready HTML, thanks to tweet-patch. This means the plain-text hashtags, user-mentions and hyperlinks are converted to twitter-ready markup.

API

Birdwatch([options])

options

refreshTime

Type: number (seconds)
Default: 600 (10 minutes)

The number of seconds to wait before the cache updates again.

Use this to update your cache frequently, but not frequent enough to hit any Twitter API Rate Limits.

logReports

Type: boolean
Default: false

Shows a pretty-printed update to the console. Useful for debugging and logging.

useTestData

Type: boolean
Default: false

Use the test tweet data instead of making a network requests. Useful for testing/debugging.

birdwatch.feed(screenname, options)

Add a twitter feed.

screenname

Required
Type: string

The screenname of the twitter account you want to watch.

options

Type: object

Options set here will override the defaults in the constructor.

Possible Options:

filter_tags
The regular expression containing the tags you want to filter with.
Type: Regex
Default: `null (filters off by default)

Tip: If you need help writing your regular expressions, try: regexpal.com

remove_retweets
Use this if you want to remove retweets from the feed you are watching.
Type: boolean
Default: false

birdwatch.start(callback)

Start the Birdwatch process.

callback(error)

Type: function

The callback gets sent to birdwatch.start() when complete

birdwatch.getCachedTweets()

Use this to access the birdwatch cache of tweets in the JSON format

Returns: Promise

Coming Soon:

• Better serving solution
• Allow custom sorting rules
• HTML-ify the cached tweets
• More caching options (currently on-disk/in-memory only)

License

The MIT License (MIT)

Copyright (c) 2015 Michael Wuergler

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.