konahart / dogpack

A Twitter bot for managing DogpatchJS

Dogpack

Dogpack is a Twitter bot which automates announcing and confirming meetups of DogpatchJS. It will:

• Tweet announcing DogpatchJS the morning of the meetup
• Accept RSVPs in the form of DMs containing emoji
• Tweet a confirmation or cancellation of the event depending on how many RSVPs are received

Setup

Dogpack is hosted on Google Cloud Functions. To set up your own Dogpack:

1. Create a new project on the Google Cloud Console.

2. Create a new Twitter app key.

3. Copy config.json.sample to config.json, and fill in:

   • project_id: Your Google Cloud project id
   • consumer_key: Your Twitter app "Consumer Key"
   • consumer_secret: Your Twitter app "Consumer Secret"

4. Authenticate with Twitter:

   1. Run ./scripts/setupTwitter.js and open http://localhost:3000 in a web browser.

   2. Click the link and authorize your Twitter app.

   3. Copy the values of access_token_key, access_token_secret, and twitter_id into your config.json.

   4. Note the value of "Suggested webhook name" for the following step.

      The webhook name should be a long random string (which is difficult to guess). We rely on obscurity to prevent unauthorized calls to the webhook endpoint because of a shortcoming in GCF which prevents checking request signatures.

5. Deploy on GCF:

   1. Create a Google Cloud Storage bucket for staging your functions.
   2. Run BUCKET=your-storage-bucket-name HOOKNAME=your-webhook-name ./scripts/setupFunctions.sh
   3. Note the HTTPs trigger endpoint URL for your webhook in the output. It might be of the form: https://region-projectname.cloudfunctions.net/your-webhook-name. Use this in the following step.

6. Set up Twitter's DM Webhook: run ./scripts/setupWebhook.js your-webhook-https-url

   You should now have a functioning bot! Test it out by triggering the "postEvent" and "postRSVPs" functions in the Cloud Functions console, or by sending it a Twitter DM.

7. Set up scheduled posting:

   1. Customize cron.yaml.sample to suit your meetup schedule.

   2. Clone this Google example repo and follow the deployment instructions, adding your cron.yaml.

      Refer to this PR (if it hasn't been merged yet) for securing your App Engine deployment.