xerebral / paperdownload

Auto-downloader of ArXiv papers from Twitter

PaperDownload

Auto-downloader of ArXiv papers from Twitter

Requirements

Tweepy >3.5.0, requests >2.21.0, should work for any python > 2.7

Description

If you're a nerd like me and your twitter feed regularly contains links to papers on ArXiv that you'd like to read later, but don't want to download to your phone, this is for you. I used to favorite such tweets and then later, log on to twitter on my computer and download the PDFs then. But that's pretty tendious in this day and age. Instead, now I can just reply to the tweets with "@PaperDownload" and the papers will be automatically downloaded and accessible from my device of choice.

This code works on links to ArXiv abstracts (arxiv.org/abs/...) or any link ending in .pdf

How to Use

Here's how you can set it up for yourselef.

1. Make a twitter account for your bot, and register it as an app. This article was my primary reference for this step. Once your app is registered, access and generate your API keys and Access Tokens.

2. Clone the repo in your desired location. Make sure you have all dependencies satisfied.

3. Edit secret.py to give your API keys and Access Tokens. They must be string type.

4. Also in secret.py, set bot_handle to your bot's handle (e.g. @give_me_knowledge) and set username to your username (no @).

5. Also in secret.py, set runtime to the desired time you want the bot to be active.

6. Once you run bot.py, any arxiv paper linked in a tweet you reply to mentioning your bot will be downloaded into the working directory.

For best performance, run this bot on a small EC2 instance (or a similar cloud resource) as a cron job. I've found that the app will disconnect from Twitter's API after ~2 days. I run my bot with runtime = 20 *3600, (20 hours), as a cron job that starts every day at 5:00 AM. That gives me a full day of utility without havign to worry about periodically restarting the bot. Also run an stfp server on this cloud instance so you can access the downloaded paper from any device of your choosing.