Twitter Email Threader

Description

I'm not very active on Twitter nowadays and I'm missing some important tweets that contain valuable information. I wanted to create something simple that would send me an email whenever one of my favorite accounts tweeted a thread, that way I wouldn't miss any important information shared by these accounts.

This is definitely not 'production ready' and it wasn't meant to be offered as a service. You can clone this repo and deploy it on AWS if you still want something like this. It's practically free to run this on AWS. More info below.

I coded it using Python and deployed it on AWS using Lambda, EventBridge, DynamoDB and SES. EventBridge was used to trigger the Lambda function every 6 hours.

I tried my best to write thorough instructions below, let me know if something doesn't make sense.

Note: Yeah I hate the nested for loops in lambda_function.py too, but it's good enough for my use case.

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How to Install and Run

1. Clone this repository and navigate into it.
2. Install the dependencies listed below using pip3
3. Change the list of usernames to the ones you'd like to monitor in the lambda_function.py file
4. Add Environment Variables in a .env file for Twitter (CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET, ACCESS_TOKEN, TOKEN_SECRET, BEARER_TOKEN) and Email (EMAIL_SENDER, EMAIL_RECIPIENT).
5. Create an AWS account if you don't have one and setup your access keys on your machine (more info)
6. Run python3 lambda_function.py

How to Deploy to AWS

1. Create a Lambda deployment package following the instructions here.
   • Make sure to install all project dependencies on step 4
   • Also add the models/Thread.py, email_template/email.css and ses_email.py files in the zip file on step 6
2. Create a new Lambda Function and upload zip using these instructions.
3. Add the appropriate policies to the Lambda function IAM Role for DynamoDB and SES access. (more info)
4. Change function timeout to ~30 seconds (or a longer time frame, depending on the number of Twitter users this script will go through). (more info)
5. Add Environment Variables to your Lambda function for Twitter (CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET, ACCESS_TOKEN, TOKEN_SECRET, BEARER_TOKEN) and Email (EMAIL_SENDER, EMAIL_RECIPIENT).
6. Test your Function! You should receive a few emails with threads from the accounts you specified in Step 3 of the previous segment.
7. Create an EventBridge Trigger for your Lambda function and schedule it to run every 6 hours. (more info)
8. Done! Things might break, sorry. Let me know if they do :)

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Dependencies

• tweepy
• boto3
• dotenv
• airium

Tech Stack

• Python 3
• AWS Lambda
• AWS DynamoDB (NoSQL)
• AWS Simple Email Service
• AWS EventBridge