Automatically Tweet popular articles from DEV

Hi everyone, over last week I've built this project which will automatically tweet my popular posts from DEV. It is live on Tweet My Articles and you can also fork it from GitHub.

Tweet My Articles

This is an open-source tool made to automatically tweet famous DEV posts to an author's Twitter account.

Motivation

I am a technical blogger on DEV. Recently, my posts have been getting a lot of traction on the platform, and to me, it is news worth sharing with the world. So, I started tweeting milestones like 1000 views and all.

At the start, it was good but, then one day Daily.dev @dailydevtips1 tagged me in this tweet.

And it got me thinking that "if they can automate it, so can I".

And that's how my friends, I started bootstrapping this project.

Technical Problem statement

We want to send a tweet when article X on DEV crosses a pre-defined milestone.

Breakdown

• Run a Cron job using GitHub Actions
• Make POST request to our API endpoints

and the API will

• Fetch all published articles of the Author from DEV
• if the article exists in the database:
  • if a new milestone is achieved:
    • Create and article a tweet on Twitter
    • Update database entry with new milestone
  • else:
    • do nothing
• the article does not exist in the database:
  • create a shortUrl for article URL using Rebrandly
  • create a new database item for the article

Technical Stack

This project is a hobby project, for a nonprofit. All the tools used here are free and openly available.

1. NextJS: this project is bootstrapped using NextJS.
2. GitHub: is used for source code management and running the cron jobs using GitHub actions.
3. Vercel: as the platform. We use their "Serverless and Edge functions".
4. MongoDB Atlas: is used as a Database provider to persist milestone information for each article.
5. Rebrandly: as a link shortener service

How do I use this project?

Step 1

Fork this project from GitHub

Step 2

Create an account on

• Vercel
• Twitter Developer
• Atlas
• Rebrandly

Step 3

Set up and get the following credentials from each platform

DEV

DEV_USERNAME=<xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
DEV_API_URL=<xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
DEV_API_KEY=<xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

You can get the API_KEY from Settings > Account > DEV Community API Keys

This needs to be specified in Vercel Environment variables

Vercel

Sign up using your GitHub to allow Continuous Deployment.

Twitter

Sign up for the Twitter developer program.

Please read all instructions there to make sure you get API access to tweet on behalf of your account.

Create a New project > Create New App > Allow Oauth1.0 with Read & Write Access.

Then get the following

CONSUMER_KEY=<xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
CONSUMER_KEY_SECRET=<xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN=<xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET=<xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

This needs to be specified in Vercel Environment variables

MongoDB Atlas

Sign up on Atlas, create a new cluster, click on Connect > Connect using Application

DB_NAME=<xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
ATLAS_URI_PROD=<xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

The DB_NAME should be the same as specified in the Connection URI

Here is a sample URI

mongodb+srv://<user>:<password>@cluster0.mongodb.net/<database-name>?retryWrites=true&w=majority

This needs to be specified in Vercel Environment variables

Rebrandly

Sign up and register your custom domain there. Then get an API KEY.

SHORTNER_API_KEY=<xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
SHORTNER_DOMAIN=<xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

This needs to be specified in Vercel Environment variables

Secure API key

We would also want to secure our own API from unauthorized users. Let's generate a long enough random string to use as API_KEY for our service. Requests with this key will be rejected.

API_KEY=<xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

This needs to be specified at

1. Vercel Environment variables
2. GitHub Environment variables (to be used by actions)

One-click deploy using Vercel

If you just want to use the tool, this is all you need to do.

Step 4

Copy the same credentials in a .env.local file for development purposes. A sample .env.development file is present in the repo for help.

Step 5

1. Run yarn in the repo to install dependencies.
2. Run yarn dev to run the local server.
3. Push to the remote repo on GitHub to automatically deploy to Vercel.

FAQs

1. Why do we need a link shortener?
   The default URL provided by DEV is sometimes too long for Twitter to load preview and without preview, the article doesn't look all that good. So I used a shortener to solve this issue. Rebrandly provides free custom domain usage up to 500 links which are good enough for our use case.

2. Why not make a SAAS?
   Well, I would love to. But because this project holds a lot of sensitive information like Twitter API keys, I would feel better in letting people own their data. That way everyone is responsible for keeping their project safe.

I'm going to extend this article into a series to explain each step in detail as well. Please follow me to get updates on that as well.

I hope you enjoyed reading this article as much as I enjoyed writing it! If so, leave a ❤️ or a 🦄! Should you have any feedback or questions, please feel free to put them in the comments below. I would love to hear and work on them.

For more such content, please follow me on Twitter

Until next time