TomSoft

Twitter Site Stream using EventMachine

January 20th, 2011

I’ve spend some time to try to use Twitter Site Streaming API with event machine, so here is just a small snipet of code on how to do it. In fact it’s pretty simple

Just go to your app page on twitter ( http://www.twitter.com/apps ) and go to your application. Get the access token here. You will find also a button “get my access token” where you can get the oauth access token and access token secret.

With these, you will be able to sign the request

require 'rubygems'
require 'eventmachine'
require 'em-http'
require 'json'
require 'oauth'
require 'oauth/client/em_http'

# Edit in your details.
CONSUMER_KEY = "<put your consumer secret key here>"
CONSUMER_SECRET = "<put your consumer key here>"
ACCESS_TOKEN = "<put your access token here>"
ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET = "<put your access token secrethere>"

def twitter_oauth_consumer
  @twitter_oauth_consumer ||= OAuth::Consumer.new(CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET, :site => "http://twitter.com")
end

def twitter_oauth_access_token
  @twitter_oauth_access_token ||= OAuth::AccessToken.new(twitter_oauth_consumer, ACCESS_TOKEN, ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET)
end

EventMachine.run do
		  # now, let's subscribe to twitter site stream
		  # check informaiton on twitter site
		  # here we are followig to user that have signed to our app...
		  toFollow=[17590452,2071231]
		 http = EventMachine::HttpRequest.new('https://betastream.twitter.com/2b/site.json'
).post(:body=>{"follow"=>toFollow.join(",")},
		 	:head => {"Content-Type" => "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"},
		 	:timeout => -1) do |client|
    		twitter_oauth_consumer.sign!(client, twitter_oauth_access_token)
  		end

	  	buffer = ""

		http.stream do |chunk|
    		buffer += chunk
   			while line = buffer.slice!(/.+\r?\n/)
   				puts "handling a new event:"+line
    		end
  		end
   		http.errback { puts "oops" }
   		http.disconnect { puts "oops, dropped connection?" }

 end

For this, I use the eventmachine plugins for ruby, as well as the oauth and em-http plugins.

Please note that you must you https with twitter in order for this to work.

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