Tutorial & Screencast: How to Tweet from NodeJS

A demo that shows Authn, Authz, Tweeting, and Direct Messages with twitter.

Upfront: If you're looking into any of the following libraries you're just wasting your time. They're mostly outdated and or unnecessary.

• node-twitter-api
• twitter-api
• node-twitter
• twitter

Instead you'll want to look at node-oauth and how it's used in this example.

Not to say that those other libraries aren't valuable, but just get it working with OAuth first and then go back and figure out which one you want to try to fork and bring up to date (or add features to).

git clone [email protected]:coolaj86/node-twitter-demo.git
pushd node-twitter-demo
npm install

You'll need to edit your /etc/hosts file so that local.example.com 127.0.0.1 exists (you can't use localhost for a twitter app's domain).

Sign up for a twitter developer account and then go to https://dev.twitter.com/apps and create an app.

Under the Settings Tab make sure that you have permissions for

• Read, Write and Access direct messages
• Allow this application to be used to Sign in with Twitter

Change config.json to use your app's Consumer Key & Secret (which is on the Details tab).

Now run the app

node app

Visit http://local.example.com:3000 and play around.

Note that you'll have to authorize before you can use the Direct Message feature, no matter how many times you authenticate.

You can use the tweet functionality, however, just by authenticating.

All of the magic happens in app.js and a tiny bit in views/index.jade. I don't think you need to look at anything else.