Display a Twitter feed from a Rails app

Question

I have been able to have a user sign in with Twitter via OmniAuth (I followed Railscast #235-6 and made a simple application). Now I am trying to display the Twitter feed of the

Answer 1

First, you don't need user credentials to get a Twitter feed if it's public. Look at the Twitter gem. Once you install the gem, all you need to do is:

require 'twitter'
Twitter.user_timeline("icambron")

Try it out in IRB to get started. Pretty easy, right?

Now, you probably want to use your API key because Twitter limits anonymous requests, and it can be problematic from a shared server. Do that in an initializer:

Twitter.configure do |config|
  config.consumer_key = YOUR_CONSUMER_KEY
  config.consumer_secret = YOUR_CONSUMER_SECRET
  config.oauth_token = YOUR_OAUTH_TOKEN
  config.oauth_token_secret = YOUR_OAUTH_TOKEN_SECRET
end

Get the actual values from your Twitter developer page.

Finally, to get really fancy, if you want to scale up, you can make the request on behalf of the user, using the OAuth credentials that you got from OmniAuth (NOT their username and password; you don't have those). That will allow you to make a lot more requests per second, because they're coming from different users. Just initialize Twitter with the consumer_key and consumer_secret fields set to the stuff you got from the OmniAuth hash (see here, look under "credentials" to see how to get them from OmniAuth).

Answer 2

class Tweet

    BASE_URL = "http://api.twitter.com/1.1/statuses/user_timeline.json"
    SCREEN_NAME = "OMGFacts"
    MAX_TWEETS = 10000

    CONSUMER_KEY = "PMiAyrY5cASMnmbd1tg"
    CONSUMER_SECRET = "0TYRYg0hrWBsr1YZrEJvS5txfA9O9aWhkEqcRaVtoA"

    class << self
      def base_url
        BASE_URL
      end

      def screen_name
        SCREEN_NAME
      end

      def url(count = MAX_TWEETS)
        params = {:screen_name => screen_name, :count => count}
        [base_url, params.to_param].join('?')
      end

      def prepare_access_token(oauth_token, oauth_token_secret)
        consumer = OAuth::Consumer.new(CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET,
          { :site => "http://api.twitter.com",
            :scheme => :header,
          })
        # now create the access token object from passed values
        token_hash = { :oauth_token => oauth_token,
                       :oauth_token_secret => oauth_token_secret,
                       :open_timeout => 500000000
                     }
        access_token = OAuth::AccessToken.from_hash(consumer, token_hash )
        return access_token
      end

      def get(count = MAX_TWEETS)
        count = Preference.get(:2000).to_i
        access_token = prepare_access_token("178394859-cJlRaiQvqVusPAPjqC2Nn7r3Uc7wWsGua7sGHzs","3T8LCZTYXzuPLGzmWX1yRnKs1JFpfJLKemoo59Piyl8")
        response = JSON.parse access_token.request(:get, url).body

        response[0...count]
      end

    end

  end