Scheduling a tweet using Python and Django

Ranvir Singh · 8 mins read ·
python django webapp

Scheduling a tweet using Python and Django
I have recently created a new account on Twitter and looking for ways to increase my followers. To achieve this, I read a lot of articles on how to get more followers.

Each and every article had one common thing in all of them.

1. The problem statement
2. Persistence
3. Scheduling
4. How to install and set it up for yourself
5. Possible improvements
6. Usages
Tweet regularly

First, I want to clarify that I am not a big fan of all the sh*t that goes on over Twitter where a user who started programming 7 days ago acts as an expert and is having a ton of followers and on the other hand, people with a lot of experience has none.

It doesn’t matter if I like it or not, I have to increase the number of followers to sound more genuine and the key ingredient for that is tweeting regularly.

But it’s hard to find time for tweeting, especially when it doesn’t come naturally to you. It’s pretty hard to come up with the content itself and it is even hard to tweet about it.

To solve this, I tried to come up with a web app in which I can schedule tweets for say the next seven days or so.

I recently read the post written by my fellow writer on how to send tweets using tweepy and was really confident that I can do it.


The problem statement

It is really important to understand what we want to achieve otherwise we end up building something totally different.

So, I divided the projects into small chunks so that it is easily achievable.

  • Persistence
We wanted to store things like tweet data, tweeting date and time and keeping the log of what all tweets have already been shared.

  • Scheduling
I wanted to use something simple to start with. Consumer-producers type scheduling was too much for this small project.

  • Documentation
Documentation is an essential part of the open-source software if you want others to use what you have built. This post itself is a part of the documentation process.

Persistence

I decided to use the already present sqlite database to store the related data for tweets.

This is how the models.py file looks for the scheduler app.

from django.db import models


class TwitterSchedulerModel(models.Model):
    tweet = models.TextField(max_length=240)
    tweet_at = models.DateTimeField()
    created_at = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True, editable=False)
    sent = models.BooleanField(default=False)
For those who don’t understand much about Django, this part of the code says that we want to create a table with 4 things added to it.

  • tweet - The tweet itself
  • tweet_at - When does someone want to tweet.
  • created_at - A datetime thing to know when you created the data entry( very helpful for debugging purposes).
  • send - Whether the tweet was sent or not.

Scheduling

I decided to use apscheduler for this small use case.

This is how the code of the scheduler looks like.

import logging
import arrow
import os
import tweepy

from twitter.models import TwitterSchedulerModel

logger = logging.getLogger(__name__)


def send_tweets(consumer_key, consumer_secret, access_token,
                access_token_secret):
    expired_tweets = TwitterSchedulerModel.objects.filter(
        sent=False, tweet_at__lte=arrow.utcnow().datetime)
    auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(consumer_key, consumer_secret)
    auth.set_access_token(access_token, access_token_secret)
    api = tweepy.API(auth)
    if expired_tweets.count() == 0:
        logging.info("No tweet to send as of now")
    for db_tweet in expired_tweets:
        logging.info('sending tweet')
        api.update_status(db_tweet.tweet)
        logging.info('tweet sent')
        db_tweet.sent = True
        db_tweet.save()


def tweet_scheduler():
    if (os.environ.get('CONSUMER_KEY') or os.environ.get('CONSUMER_SECRET') or
       os.environ.get('ACCESS_TOKEN') or os.environ.get('TOKEN_SECRET')):
        consumer_key = os.environ.get('CONSUMER_KEY')
        consumer_secret = os.environ.get('CONSUMER_SECRET')
        access_token = os.environ.get('ACCESS_TOKEN')
        access_token_secret = os.environ.get('TOKEN_SECRET')
        send_tweets(
            consumer_key, consumer_secret, access_token, access_token_secret)
    else:
        raise NotImplementedError('Set environment variables correctly')
The tweet_scheduler is the entry function. First, we are checking whether the environment variables are set or not.

After that, we are calling the send_tweet function where we get all the database entries for which sent_tweet time has already passed and use the tweepy library to send the tweet. Finally, we update the database to save the updated value.

How to install and set it up for yourself

Clone the repo

The first step is to clone the repo.

https://github.com/singh1114/schedule-tweet

git clone [email protected]:singh1114/schedule-tweet.git

Install the requirements

cd schedule-tweet
Turn on the virtualenv and install the requirements. Please read a little about virtual environment if you don’t know about it.

pip install -r requirements.txt

Run migrations to set up the database

cd scheduletweet
python manage.py migrate

Create a super user

python manage.py createsuperuser

Export the creds

Now if you were following the tutorial correctly and if you have read the tweepy post that I shared earlier, you should have your Twitter API key and other creds handy.

If you haven’t read it already, you can visit https://developer.twitter.com/ and create an app to get all the credentials or you can read this post if you are facing problems to figure it out. If you are still facing any issue, feel free to ping me anywhere.

Once you have them you have to export them to your shell,

export CONSUMER_KEY="#"
export CONSUMER_SECRET="#"
export ACCESS_TOKEN="#"
export TOKEN_SECRET="#"
You have to keep exporting them whenever you open a new shell window or you can use direnv to make your life easier.

Run the server

python manage.py runserver

Open the admin window and schedule a tweet after sometime

Visit http://127.0.0.1:8000/admin to login with superuuser creds and twitterschedulermodel to create a new scheduled tweet.

Scheduling a tweet in django admin
If the time has passed and the tweet is still in the not_sent state, it will trigger the tweet in the next 5 minutes when the scheduler runs.

That’s it for today’s post. If you find an issue while trying it out, do let me know in the comments section, I will be happy to help.

Possible improvements

The current system doesn’t allow us to send images in the tweets, we can accommodate for that as well. I don’t think that will be hard. Feel free to raise Pull Requests to the repo if you find any issue.

Usages

We have used the software to send 50 tweets as of now and gained almost 18 followers to our profile organically.

About Author

Ranvir Singh

Greetings! Ranvir is an Engineering professional with 3+ years of experience in Software development.

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