Description of Project
The project is an automated bot on Twitter that tweets quotes. The bot tweets everyday at GMT 1:30 AM, but can also reply to other users on Twitter within one minute of a user tweeting "@QuotesBot687 Give me a quote"
Tech Stack
- Node.js
- Appwrite Cloud
The Development journey
So this hackathon came at the perfect time for me. It couldn't have been better. I had been looking for an easy to host solution for this bot for a long time, but I couldn't find anything. I tried Google Cloud, Amazon AWS, Supabase and even Vercel. But everything was either
- A) Very difficult to setup and get executing
- B) Too Pricy Or
- C) Literally overkill specs for an app like this.
Like come on... I don't need 500GB of storage and 24GB RAM to run this application.
And then came the hackathon! I had seen the Appwrite logo in some videos on YouTube earlier, but didn't really know about it. So this hackathon arriving just when I'm looking for a hosting solution for my Twitter Bot is a really cool coincidence.
Why I made the Bot
Twitter's considered to be pretty toxic. I think the bot is a nice way to spread some happiness :) The bot also allowed me to practice my coding skills, so it was a two for one!
Challenges I Faced
For me, working with Appwrite was (almost) smooth as butter. I honestly found setting everything up so easy, and the documentation... The documentation was just mwah 👌 Honestly love it when a technology has such good documentation.
With Appwrite I faced only two issues,
- Cron Syntax not working properly
- Me not setting my API Credentials and whatnot with which I was quickly helped by the very nice Appwrite community on discord :)
The main challenge which I spent a lot of time on was figuring out how to query the Twitter API properly to get replies to a tweet that mentioned the bot, and only replies that were by the bot itself (It's so the bot doesn't reply twice to the same tweet)
Other than that I had a very fine and dandy time developing with Appwrite. I would like to use this technology again.
Public Code Repo
You can find the code for this Twitter Bot at
https://github.com/RanvirChoudhary/Twitter-Bot-Appwrite
Demo Link
You can find the Twitter Bot at
https://twitter.com/QuotesBot687