Updated on September 22, 2020 in #linux

Use Twitter's API and a Few Command Line Tools to Pick a Random Reply

In this video we'll pipe together twarc, jq, sed, sort and head to pick a random reply from a tweet. This could be useful for contests.

I recently found myself wanting to run a contest on Twitter where I would pick a random person who replied to a tweet so they could get a free NGINX T-shirt.

I was on a time crunch for this because I was involved with an NGINX virtual conference, so I spent about 20 minutes one morning slapping together a few command line tools to help automate and fairly pick a winner.

# Going Over Everything

Timestamps

• 0:11 – You could use this strategy for picking winners in a contest
• 1:25 – Using twarc (a Python library) to interface with Twitter’s API
• 2:12 – Creating a Twitter app and getting your API keys
• 12:21 – Installing twarc, fixing the access keys and installing jq
• 15:21 – Using jq to parse out Twitter handles from the JSON API response
• 16:36 – Using sed to delete myself from the list of handles
• 17:33 – Using sort to get a unique random list of handles
• 19:10 – Using head to grab the first result
• 19:33 – Making it even more random by running it a random amount of times
• 20:56 – Setting the LANG (locale) to English to control how things are sorted
• 22:25 – The command line is so nice for solving specific problems you might have

Code

Here’s the steps on how to get this set up locally:

1. pip3 install --user twarc

2. sudo apt-get install jq (jq is available with brew and other package managers too)

3. Create your Twitter API keys at https://apps.twitter.com

4. Create an .env file using the snippet below and paste in your keys:

   export ACCESS_TOKEN=
   export ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET=
   
   export CONSUMER_KEY=
   export CONSUMER_SECRET=
   

Pick out a random Twitter handle from a list of replies to a specific tweet:

#  Get accesss to your Twitter API credentials.
source .env

twarc replies 1306247342140645376 \
  | jq -r ".user.screen_name" \
  | sed "/^nickjanetakis$/d" \
  | LANG=en_US.UTF-8 sort -uR \
  | head -n 1

It would be expected that you replace 1306247342140645376 with your tweet’s ID and to replace nickjanetakis with your Twitter handle or any handle you want to ignore.

Reference Links

• https://nginx.com
• https://www.nginx.com/blog/join-us-nginx-sprint-2020/
• NGINX Sprint 2020 Playlist
• Tech Field Day Coverage Playlist

Are you going to use this to pick winners for a contest? Let us know below.