twitter-cloud-run

A (relatively) minimal configuration app to run Twitter bots on a schedule using Google Cloud Run and Google Cloud Scheduler, making running the bot effectively free and can scale to effectively an unlimited number of bots if necessary.

There are two variants in their respective folders:

• human_curated : Uses a centralized Cloud SQL database to load pregenerated Tweets, and records if a tweet is generated. Recommended for AI tweet generation due to unpredictibility of AI-generated tweets.
• gpt-2: Uses an pretrained GPT-2 model, similar to the gpt2-cloud-run repo. (although the base app.py is built for gpt-2-simple, it's easy to hack it out and replace your own method of text generation for the bot.

Each folder has a Dockerfile and an app.py which runs the app in Cloud Run: you can build the container in Docker using docker build ., and upload it to Google Container Registry with these instuctions.

Usage

The app is configured using Environment Variables; this avoids hardcoding the access tokens within the container and therefore a security risk (encoding secrets in environment variables isn't the ideal solution for handling secrets in general, but it is sufficient for this app)

Additionally, you can specify a REQUEST_TOKEN as an Environment Variable, to prevent others from triggering the app accidentially (i.e. via random IP sniffing, as Cloud Run URLs are public).

See the READMEs in the folders for more pertinent information to the app.

Setting Up A Twitter Bot

To run a Twitter bot, you need the CONSUMER_KEY and CONSUMER_SECRET for an app, and the ACCESS_TOKEN and ACCESS_SECRET corresponding to the user. Per recent Twitter antibotting changes, this has been made more difficult:

1. Create a Twitter app on your human account. You will have to go through a manual Twitter review.
2. In the App Settings, you'll see the CONSUMER_KEY and CONSUMER_SECRET.
3. Set up Twurl on your computer.
4. In a Terminal, run twurl authorize --consumer-key <CONSUMER_KEY> --consumer-secret <CONSUMER_SECRET> with the info above. It will give you a URL to approve an app; go to that URL on your bot account and approve the app. It will give you a PIN to input into the terminal.
5. Open the ~/.twurlrc file, which will have thee ACCESS_TOKEN and ACCESS_SECRET you need for that account.

Examples

• @minimaxir_GPT2 — bot of @minimaxir (me!)
• @GenePark_GPT2 — bot of @GenePark
• @IceT_GPT2 — bot of @FINALLEVEL

Maintainer/Creator

Max Woolf (@minimaxir)

Max's open-source projects are supported by his Patreon and GitHub Sponsors. If you found this project helpful, any monetary contributions to the Patreon are appreciated and will be put to good creative use.

License

MIT

Disclaimer

This repo has no affiliation with Twitter Inc.