Publish Feed

A publisher of articles from websites RSS feeds to Twitter.

Table of Contents

• Publish Feed
• Overview

Overview

This app currently perform two tasks:

• download RSS content from several sources listed in feeds.yml
• publish its titles and links to Twitter

This is an easy way to get your blog posts automatically tweeted.

Installation

Install dependencies

Install Pip dependencies: make install

Get Twitter credentials

Create a Twitter app at https://apps.twitter.com/ and generate keys with read and write permissions.

Set up credentials and feeds

Customize feeds.yml.skel and save it as feeds.yml:

cd publishfeed
cp feeds.yml.skel feeds.yml

For example, defining feeds for two different Twitter accounts, <twitter.com/simpleitrocks> and <twitter.com/reddit>, would look like:

simpleitrocks: #twitter handler
  twitter:
	consumer_key: 'XXXXXX'
	consumer_secret: 'XXXXXXX'
	access_key: 'XXXXXX'
	access_secret: 'XXXXXX'
  urls:
	- https://simpleit.rocks/feed
  hashtags: '#TechTutorials'
reddit:
  twitter:
	consumer_key: 'XXXXXX'
	consumer_secret: 'XXXXXXX'
	access_key: 'XXXXXX'
	access_secret: 'XXXXXX'
  urls:
    - http://www.reddit.com/.rss
    - http://www.reddit.com/r/news/.rss
    - http://www.reddit.com/user/marcanuy/.rss
  hashtags: '#RedditFrontPage'

Running

There are two commands available:

$ python main.py

usage: main.py [-h] [-g | -t] feed

Process and publish RSS Feeds articles

positional arguments:
  feed            Index from feeds.yml

optional arguments:
  -h, --help      show this help message and exit
  -g, --getfeeds  Download and save new articles from the list of feeds
  -t, --tweet     Tweet unpublished articles from this list of feeds

• python main.py <TwitterHandler> --getfeeds

  Download all the pages from the URLs defined in urls and save the new ones. E.g.: python main.py reddit --getfeeds

• python main.py <TwitterHandler> --tweet

  Tweet the oldest unpublished page (previously downloaded with --getfeeds). E.g.: python main.py reddit --tweet

Cronjobs

Set up two cronjobs to publish new feed content automatically:

crontab -e

# hourly download new pages 
0 * * * * workon publishfeed; cd publishfeed; python main.py reddit --getfeeds

# tweet every 15 minutes if there are unpublished pages
*/15 * * * * workon publishfeed; cd publishfeed; python main.py reddit --tweet

Make sure you configure the tweeter cronjob with at least 2 minutes between each job so your credentials won't be suspended

Design

feeds.yml populates the FeedSet model, then for each url, new content is created as RSSContent instances (using SQLAlchemy) and saved in /databases/rss_<twitterhandler>.db SQLite databases.

To tweet a new post, we get the oldest unpublished page from RSSContent, publish it and change its status.

Questions

Do you think there is something missing or that can be improved? Feel free to open issues and/or contributing!

License

MIT Licensed.