isitjustascam

Twitter bot developed to perform some checks on a target website and make an educated guess whether the site is scam (or fake) or real. This bot is only made to automate some basic checks and the results it generates may not be accurate sometimes. However, new checks can be added to improve the efficiency of the bot. You can contribute new checks and features to this project.

Setup

Docker image coming soon. The bot can be setup locally by just configuring a database, and twitter API. This setup guide assumes you have a debian-based linux machine.

Install Requirements

pip install -r requirements.txt

Configuring a database

• Install MySQL server

sudo apt install mysql-server

• Login as root

sudo mysql -u root

• Create a new user

CREATE USER 'twitterbot'@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'password';

• Grant privileges

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'twitterbot'@localhost

• Create database and necessary tables

cd /bot
python dbmake.py

Twitter API

You first need to create a twitter account, enable the developer mode and create a new project.

Get API Keys

You need to then get the following credentials from your twitter developer console. Add them all into a .env file in your project's root directory. You can optionally just add these into your environment variables, whatever you prefer. Ignore the last variable TEST. It only exists for testing purposes.

API_KEY=<YOUR API KEY>
API_KEY_SECRET=<YOUR API KEY SECRET>
BEARER_TOKEN=<YOUR BEARER TOKEN>
ACCESS_TOKEN=<YOUR ACCESS TOKEN>
ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET=<YOUR ACCESS TOKEN SECRET>
USER_ID=<YOUR BOT USER ID>
BOT_USERNAME=<YOUR BOT USERNAME>
TEST=FORTEST

Google Custom Search API

One of the checks requires you to have a google custom search json api key in order to perform google searches. You can create a custom search engine here. Get your API key and include it in the your environment variables (or the .env file). So your environment variables should look like this:

API_KEY=<YOUR API KEY>
API_KEY_SECRET=<YOUR API KEY SECRET>
BEARER_TOKEN=<YOUR BEARER TOKEN>
ACCESS_TOKEN=<YOUR ACCESS TOKEN>
ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET=<YOUR ACCESS TOKEN SECRET>
USER_ID=<YOUR BOT USER ID>
BOT_USERNAME=<YOUR BOT USERNAME>
TEST=FORTEST
GOOGLE_SEARCH_API_KEY=<YOUR GOOGLE SEARCH API KEY>

Run tests

It is always a good idea to run unit tests before deploying the bot even locally. You can run the tests from the root directory of the project

python -m unittest discover -s tests

Run

In-order to run the bot, you need to execute the python program /bot/twitterapi.py You can do that in the following ways:

Method 1

Execute manually using nohup

nohup python bot/twitterapi.py &

This will execute the script in the background and will keep running even after you log off from your shell.

Method 2

• Create a systemd service. This is the better option.

cd /etc/systemd/system

• Create a new service

nano scamornot.service

• Paste the following

[Unit]
Description=Twitter bot for Scam or Not (twitter.com/isitjustascam)

[Service]
User=<your linux username>
WorkingDirectory=<absolute path of twitterapi.py>
ExecStart=python twitterapi.py

StandardOutput=file:/tmp/twitterbot-stdout
StandardError=file:/tmp/twitterbot-stderr

Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

• Include the newly added service

sudo systemctl daemon-reload

• Start the service

sudo systemctl start scamornot.service

• Enable to run at startup

sudo systemctl enable scamornot.service