Tweet CLI

by Nicholas C. Zakas

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Description

A simple CLI for sending tweets. This is intended for use in CI systems such as GitHub actions in order to enable to Twitter notifications of important events.

Usage

You must have Node.js to use this package.

To start, you must have a registered Twitter application.

Next, define four environment variables:

• TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_KEY - your access token
• TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET - your access token secret
• TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY - your consumer API key
• TWITTER_CONSUMER_SECRET - your consumer API secret

The CLI will not work without these environment variables. All of these values come from your Twitter application.

Then, you can run the CLI and pass a message on the command line using npx:

$ npx @humanwhocodes/tweet "Hello from the command line!"

If successful, the CLI will output the response from Twitter.

Setting Twitter API version

By default, Tweet uses v2 of the Twitter API. If you'd like to use v1.1 of the Twitter API instead, set the TWITTER_API_VERSION environment variable to v1.

Testing with dotenv

If you'd like to test with dotenv, define an additional environment variable TWEET_DOTENV=1 before executing the CLI. This will cause a local .env file to be read before executing.

Using in a GitHub Workflow

Be sure to set up GitHub secrets for each environment variable. Then, you can configure a job like this:

jobs:
  tweet:
    name: Tweet Something
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/setup-node@v3
        with:
          node-version: 18
      - run: 'npx @humanwhocodes/tweet "Your tweet text"'
        env:
          TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY: ${{ secrets.TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY }}
          TWITTER_CONSUMER_SECRET: ${{ secrets.TWITTER_CONSUMER_SECRET }}
          TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_KEY: ${{ secrets.TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_KEY }}
          TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET: ${{ secrets.TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET }}

Developer Setup

1. Ensure you have Node.js 12+ installed
2. Fork and clone this repository
3. Run npm install
4. Run npm test to run tests

Troubleshooting

Console says "Required environment variable 'TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_KEY' is an empty string."

You haven't setup the correct environment variables for Tweet CLI. Double check that you don't have any misspellings in your environment variable settings.

GitHub Actions console says "Required environment variable 'TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_KEY' is an empty string."

You're probably trying to use the Tweet CLI during the pull_request event. This won't work because secrets are not available when a pull request is from a fork. Try using the pull_request_target event instead. (More information)

License and Copyright

This code is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License (see LICENSE for details).

Copyright Human Who Codes LLC. All rights reserved.