Making a simple subreddit submissions tweeter in Python 2013-09-16

In this short post we are going write a simple script in Python that reads submissions from a subreddit and posts links to them on Twitter.

Setup

First, create a virtualenv and activate it with:

$ virtualenv -p /usr/bin/python2 env
$ source env/bin/activate

Then install the necessary dependencies tweepy and requests:

$ pip install tweepy requests

Method for retrieving subreddit submissions

Using the library requests we will fetch new submissions from a subreddit:

import requests
def get_reddit_posts(subreddit, number_of_posts):
    reddit = requests.get('http://www.reddit.com/r/{}/new/.json?limit={}'
                              .format(subreddit, number_of_posts),
                          headers={'User-Agent': 'Reddit Tweeter'})
    submissions = reddit.json()['data']['children']
    submissions = [{'id': s['data']['id'],
                    'title': s['data']['title'],
                    'url': 'http://redd.it/{}'.format(s['data']['id'])
                   } for s in submissions]
    return submissions

The method returns a list of dictionaries containing the submissions' IDs, titles and URLs.

Get a Twitter access token and consumer key

Visit Twitter's dev page and create a new app. When you have created an app, visit its settings page and change Access to Read and Write. Then go back to the Details view and create an access token.

When that's done, go back to Python and create the following global variables with your data:

ACCESS_TOKEN = ''
ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET = ''
CONSUMER_KEY = ''
CONSUMER_SECRET = ''

Method for posting submissions to Twitter

Define the following global variables:

TAGS = '#Python #Programming'
SUBREDDIT = 'python'
NUMBER_OF_POSTS = 30

Of course are you free to change these values to anything you want.

Then write the following method:

import tweepy
def tweet(submissions):
    auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET)
    auth.set_access_token(ACCESS_TOKEN, ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET)
    api = tweepy.API(auth)
    for each in submissions:
        # Add the url and the tags to the tweet
        tweet = u'{} {}'.format(each['url'], TAGS)
        title_length = len(each['title'])
        title = None
        if title_length < 139 - len(tweet):
            # The whole title fits in the tweet
            title = each['title']
        else:
            # If the title doesn't fit, make it end with `...`
            title = u'{}...'.format(each['title'][:139 - len(tweet) - 4])
        tweet = u'{} {}'.format(title, tweet)
        print(u'[bot] posting: {}'.format(tweet))
        # Try to post the tweet
        try:
            api.update_status(tweet)
        except tweepy.TweepError, e:
            if e.message[0]['code'] == 187:
                print('[bot] Tweet is a duplicate')
                continue

• This method takes the list of submissions as an argument.
• Then it sets up access to Twitter's API.
• For each submission it will post a tweet.
  • First we set tweet to Reddit's short URL and the previously specified tags.
  • If the length of the title is shorter than the URL and the tags we can just prepend it to the tweet. Otherwise we cuts the title off and ends it with ....
  • When the tweet is ready, post it to Twitter with api.update_status(tweet).

Main method

Lastly we will write the main method that binds the previously two methods together:

if __name__ == '__main__':
    submissions = get_reddit_posts(SUBREDDIT, NUMBER_OF_POSTS)
    tweet(submissions)

Complete script

Room for further improvements

This is just a very first version of something that could become a nice bot. For example could the submission IDs be stored in a file or a SQLite database to keep track of which submission that have already been tweeted. The global variables could be moved to a separate .ini config file. We could use a proper logger. And we could also set up a cronjob to automatically post new tweets regularly.

Inspiration

I wrote this post because of the inspiration I got from this Reddit discussion about another Reddit + Twitter bot.