Putting it all together

Ok, so those examples were good n' all but we haven't really got a bot out of this have we? I mean you run it from the terminal and that's it done, we want to be able to kick off the bot and leave it to do its thing.

One way I have found to do this is to use setInterval which will kick off events from the main bot.js module, so lets try this:

Take the example we did to tweet a picture and add it to it's own module, so from the root directory of our project:

cd src
touch picture-bot.js

Take the example code from that and paste it into the new module, then we're going to make the following changes, to getPhoto:

const getPhoto = () => {
  const parameters = {
    url: 'https://api.nasa.gov/planetary/apod',
    qs: {
      api_key: process.env.NASA_KEY
    },
    encoding: 'binary'
  }
  request.get(parameters, (err, respone, body) => {
    body = JSON.parse(body)
    saveFile(body, 'nasa.jpg')
  })
}

Then at the bottom of the module add:

module.exports = getPhoto

So now we can call the getPhoto function from the picture-bot.js module in our bot.js module, our bot.js module should look something like this:

const picture = require('./picture-bot')

picture()

That's it, two lines of code, try running that from the terminal now:

npm run start

We should get some output like this:

$ node index.js
Media saved!
file PATH C:\Users\path\to\project\tweebot-play\nasa.jpg
{ media_id: 863020197799764000,
  media_id_string: '863020197799763968',
  size: 371664,
  expires_after_secs: 86400,
  image: { image_type: 'image/jpeg', w: 954, h: 944 } }
Status posted!
Done in 9.89s.

Ok, so thats the picture of the day done, but it has run once and completed we need to put it on an interval with setInterval which we need to pass two options to, the function it's going to call and the timeout value.

The picture updates every 24 hours so that will be how many milliseconds in 24 hours [8.64e+7] I don't even 🤷‍

I work it out like this, 1000 60 = 1 minute, so 1000 60 60 24 so for now lets add that directly into the setInterval function:

const picture = require('./picture-bot')

picture()
setInterval(picture, 1000 * 60 * 60 * 24)

Cool, that's a bot that will post the NASA image of the day every 24 hours!

Lets keep going, now lets add some randomness in with the Markov bot, like we did in the picture of the day example, lets create a new module for the Markov bot and add all the code in there from the previous example, so from the terminal:

cd src
touch markov-bot.js

Then copy pasta the markov bot example into the new module, then we're going to make the following changes:

const tweetData = () => {
  fs.createReadStream(filePath)
    .pipe(csvparse({
      delimiter: ','
    }))
    .on('data', row => {
      inputText = `${inputText} ${cleanText(row[5])}`
    })
    .on('end', () => {
      const markov = new rita.RiMarkov(10)
      markov.loadText(inputText)
        .toString()
        .substring(0, 140)
      const sentence = markov.generateSentences(1)
      bot.post('statuses/update', {
        status: sentence
      }, (err, data, response) => {
        if (err) {
          console.log(err)
        } else {
          console.log('Markov status tweeted!', sentence)
        }
      })
    })
}

Then at the bottom of the module add:

module.exports = tweetData

Ok, same again as with the picture bot example we're going to add the tweetData export from markov-bot.js to our bot.js module, which should now look something like this:

const picture = require('./picture-bot')
const markov = require('./markov-bot')

picture()
setInterval(picture, 1000 * 60 * 60 * 24)

markov()

Let's make the Markov bot tweet at random intervals between 5 minutes and 3 hours

const picture = require('./picture-bot')
const markov = require('./markov-bot')

picture()
setInterval(picture, 1000 * 60 * 60 * 24)

const markovInterval = (Math.floor(Math.random() * 180) + 1) * 1000
markov()
setInterval(markov, markovInterval)

Allrighty! Picture bot, Markov bot, done 👍

Do the same with the link bot? Ok, same as before, you get the idea now, right?

Create a new file in the src folder for link bot:

touch link-bot.js

Copy pasta the code from the link bot example into the new module, like this:

const link = () => {
  Tabletop.init({
    key: spreadsheetUrl,
    callback(data, tabletop) {
      data.forEach(d => {
        const status = `${d.links} a link from a Google spreadsheet`
        console.log(status)
        bot.post('statuses/update', {
          status
        }, (err, response, data) => {
          if (err) {
            console.log(err)
          } else {
            console.log('Post success!')
          }
        })
      })
    },
    simpleSheet: true
  })
}

module.exports = link

Then we can call it from the bot, so it should look something like this:

const picture = require('./picture-bot')
const markov = require('./markov-bot')
const link = require('./link-bot')

picture()
setInterval(picture, 1000 * 60 * 60 * 24)

const markovInterval = (Math.floor(Math.random() * 180) + 1) * 1000
markov()
setInterval(markov, markovInterval)


link()
setInterval(link, 1000 * 60 * 60 * 24)

Ok? Cool 👍😎

We can now leave the bot running to do its thing!!

Previous: Retrieve and tweet data from a Google sheet.

Next: Deploy to now.