CutiesInBoston

Post a random adoptable pet from the Boston MSPCA to a twitter feed.

Project of Becky Boone and Drew during their fellowship at Code for America in 2014.

Modified by CodeforBoston to work with the Petfinder.com API

Heroku Deploy

About

A twitter bot that pulls data from the Petfinder API and tweets out adoptable pets from the Boston MSPCA.

It should be easily extendable to other shelters using petfinder.com to list their animals.

Links to API and Bot

• Twitter bot

• API Docs`

Setup

Install dependencies (other gems, aka Ruby libraries)

bundle install

Get your API keys

You need to sign up for a twitter API. You'll need all of the following:

• consumer_key
• consumer_secret
• access_token
• access_token_secret

To get twitter keys setup an application for your twitter account: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/auth/tokens-devtwittercom

You'll also need Petfinder keys

• petfinder_key
• petfinder_secret

To get them, first register for a Petfinder account: https://users.petfinder.com/login

Then sign up for the API keys: https://www.petfinder.com/developers/api-key

Then find your shelter_id by searching for a shelter in your city

Set up your environment variables

Modify the .env file to include your actual keys instead of placeholders. The variables in this file will be automatically picked up when you run the rake task.

Do not commit your modified .env file to anywhere public. The .env line in the .gitignore file prevents you from accidentially exposing your keys. Do not remove this line.

consumer_key=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
consumer_secret=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
access_token=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
access_token_secret=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
petfinder_key=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
petfinder_secret=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
shelter_id="MA38"

How to Tweet

rake tweet

The tweet task is in the Rakefile, which invokes the rest of cuties.rb.

How to Tweet Periodically

Install the application on a server or a computer that will be powered on continuously.

cd <install_path>
git clone git@github.com:codeforboston/CutiesInBoston.git
cd CutiesInBoston
bundle install
crontab -e  # opens an editor to add a line to your scheduled cron jobs

Add the following to your crontab

00 08,16 * * * cd <install_path>/CutiesInBoston && /usr/local/bin/rake tweet

This tweets at 8:00am and 4:00pm (0800 hours and 1600 hours) every day. You can learn how to configure the crontab to your preference here.

Alternatives

CutiesInDenver uses Heroku and the Heroku Scheduler plugin to tweet at regular intervals.

Hat tips

• Kudos to Darius for his great guide on how to make a twitter bot.

• And kudo to Erik for the twitter gem.