Metline alerts

This app uses the Twitter API to set up bespoke notifications for public transport delays.

I use London's TfL Metropolitan line to commute every day to and from work. The Metropolitan line has an active Twitter account, @metline, where you can find realtime updates on delays and cancellations. But not all Tweets sent from @metline are relevant to me. I built this application to monitor the account @metline for relevant Tweets. Each time a Tweet of interest is created, I receive a notification (by sending a Tweet that @mentions me).

Resources

Check out this blog post for a walkthrough on how to reproduct this app.

You will need the following

• Choose a Twitter account that Tweets information of interest (in this case @metline).
• Twitter account(s) of the notification recipient(s), in other words the commuter(s). For this, I used my primary Twitter account (@AureliaSpecker).
• Twitter account of the notification sender. For this, I used a secondary Twitter account (@maddie_testing).
• Twitter developer account: if you don’t have one already, you can apply for one. The developer account should be linked to the Twitter account of the notification sender (in this example: @maddie_testing).
• Twitter developer app
• Access keys and tokens for the app you created above
• Set up your dev environment for "Search Tweets: 30-DaysSandbox" to something like dev or prod
• Have pip installed on your laptop
• Python version 3.6 or above (in your command line, you can check what version of Python is installed by running $ python --version)

Credentials

Create a credentials.yaml file and subsequently add it to your .gitignore file.

In credentials.yaml, add your access keys and tokens in the format below. Replace {ENV} with the dev environment name you set up in the developer portal and insert your access keys and tokens for each field accordingly.

search_tweets_api:
  account_type: premium
  endpoint: https://api.twitter.com/1.1/tweets/search/30day/{ENV}.json
  consumer_key: XXXXXXXXXX
  consumer_secret: XXXXXXXXXX
  access_token: XXXXXXXXXX
  access_token_secret: XXXXXXXXXX