Raspberry Pi Bot Server

My trusty RPi3 twitter bot server "starkiller".

So let's say you've got a twitter bot that you want running 24/7, but you don't want it running on your personal system. What you need here is a server, which is really just a dedicated system. Note, if you're looking for a web server, you'd be better off with Amazon's AWS .

If you're running automated tasks and answering tweets however, a Raspberry Pi is an excellent choice. 

The steps are pretty straightforward:

1. Setup a computer (raspberry pi) to run your program.
2. Write a script to launch your program.
3. Run the script automatically at startup.

Setup your computer

The starting point here is simply to buy a Raspberry Pi. RPi3 is great because it has build in wifi, and it's very affordable, any generation will work though. Once you've got the hardware, you need to install an OS. I strongly recommend Raspbian Jessie with Pixel (download and install guide can be found here).

Simple Python Twitter Bot

Twitter Bots

Twitter has some amazing bot personalities; from celebrity impersonators, to genuinely useful automated announcements. It is also probably the first place anyone was exposed to bots and interacted with them. Some of my favourites are BIGBEN and CaptainMarkov. It is also very easy to make a simple bot, especially if you're familiar with python.

In this post, I'm going to walk you through the creation of Mirror_Bot_1000. Mirror_bot_1000 reads tweets when its username is mentioned, and then makes its own tweet with the mirror image.

It's a great example for the simple interactions with Twitter's API because it requires you to read a message, post a message, and keep track of where you left off. If you want to make your bot more complicated, you just have to modify the decision-making behind the tweets.

The entirety of the code in this example can be found on github here. An intro to python can be found here.

Account Setup