Awesome

Cuties In Hampton Roads

Project of Becky Boone and Drew during their fellowship at Code for America in 2014.

Modified by CodeforBoston to work with the Petfinder.com API

Modified by CodeforHamptonRoads to move the shelter_id to an environment variable so one repository can be used for several cities. Also added #hashtags for breed, type, and city.

About

A twitter bot that pulls data from the Petfinder API and tweets out adoptable pets from the the shelter of your choosing to a twitter feed.

This is easily extendable to other shelters using petfinder.com to list their animals.

This Github Repository supports this Twitter account:

• Twitter bot

Petfinder API Docs:

• API Docs`

Setup

Install dependencies (other gems, aka Ruby libraries)

bundle install

Get your API keys

You need to sign up for a twitter API. You'll need all of the following:

• consumer_key
• consumer_secret
• access_token
• access_token_secret
• shelter_id of the shelter you want to query

To get twitter keys setup an application for your twitter account: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/auth/tokens-devtwittercom

You'll also need Petfinder keys

• petfinder_key
• petfinder_secret

To get them, first register for a Petfinder account: https://users.petfinder.com/login

Then sign up for the API keys: https://www.petfinder.com/developers/api-key

Set up your environment variables

Copy template.env and rename as .env file to include your actual keys instead of placeholders. The variables in this file will be automatically picked up when you run the rake task. If you would like to specify multiple shelters to select random pets from, identify them as a comma-separated list.

Do not commit your modified .env file to anywhere public. The .env line in the .gitignore file prevents you from accidentally exposing your keys. Do not remove this line.

consumer_key=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
consumer_secret=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
access_token=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
access_token_secret=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
petfinder_key=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
petfinder_secret=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
shelter_id=MA124

How to Tweet

rake tweet

The tweet task is in the Rakefile, which invokes the rest of cuties.rb.

Alternatives

CutiesInNorfolk and CutiesInPtown uses Heroku and the Heroku Scheduler plugin to tweet hourly.

You can use this Github repository for several Twitter account as long as you set the environment variables on the Heroku instances.

Hat tips

• Kudos to Darius for his great guide on how to make a twitter bot.

• And kudo to Erik for the twitter gem.