Make a Twitter Bot in Python and AWS Lambda

I followed this excellent tutorial from Joel Grus on how to make a Twitter Bot. If you have followed some of my post before, Project Mining Social Web 2nd Edition or Python with JSon, you know I have had a little bit of experience using the Twitter API.

Here is a screenshot of the Twitter Bot:

What is different this time, is that I wish to use AWS Lambda as the backend. I want to know what is required and what the workflow was. I wont repeat the steps Joel listed out in his tutorial, just some of the things I found out:

1. Seems that AWS Lambda wants the main file to be lambda_function.py and the main function to be lambda_handler(event, context).

2. The scheduling trigger is now "CloudWatch Events - Schedule" instead of just schedule.

3. I learned this from a friend that to always immediately put the credential file in .gitignore to avoid accidentally checking it in on GitHub.

echou$ cat .gitignore
*.pyc
credentials.json

I am now the proud owner of a Twitter Bot that searches for Cisco layoff news and retweet them. On this date of Aug. 19, 2016 that was the big news of the week.

https://twitter.com/Network4_Nerds

echou$

Here is what my code ended up as:

from __future__ import print_function
from twython import Twython
from twython.exceptions import TwythonError
import re
import json, pprint
with open('credentials.json') as f:
  credentials = json.loads(f.read())
client = Twython(credentials["consumer_key"],
                 credentials["consumer_secret"],
                 credentials["access_token_key"],
                 credentials["access_token_secret"])
query = "cisco layoffs -filters:retweets"
rgx = r"cisco"
def lambda_handler(event, context):
    results = client.search(q=query)
    for tweet in results["statuses"]:
        text = tweet["text"]
        # re.search matches anywhere in the string; re.I means case-insensitive
        if re.search(rgx, text, re.I):
            print(tweet["text"])
            # client.retweet will raise an error if we try to retweet a tweet
            # that we've already retweeted. to avoid having to keep track, we
            # just use a try/except block
            try:
                client.retweet(id=tweet["id"])
            except TwythonError as e:
                print(e)

results = client.search(q=query)
pprint.pprint(results)

Happy Coding!