MyChores Journal

I believe in sharing knowledge, so here is the method to achieve a Twitter update from Ruby (using POST, as GET is now disabled by Twitter for security reasons). This code requires Ruby 1.8.5 for the set_form_data method.

With Ruby on Rails, the following is best placed in a controller. This probably isn’t the only way of doing it, but if you’re looking for something that ‘just works’ this is it. You might want to add some flash[:notice] alerts to let the user know what happened.

require 'net/http'
require 'uri'

twitter_email = 'example@whoever.com'
twitter_password = 'urpassw0rdhere'
update_text = 'Testing Twitter update using Ruby code!'

begin
    url = URI.parse('http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml')
    req = Net::HTTP::Post.new(url.path)
    req.basic_auth twitter_email, twitter_password
    req.set_form_data({'status' => update_text})

    begin
        res = Net::HTTP.new(url.host, url.port).start {|http| http.request(req) }

        case res
        when Net::HTTPSuccess, Net::HTTPRedirection
            if res.body.empty?
                # Twitter is not responding properly
            else
                # Twitter update succeeded
            end

        else
            # Twitter update failed for an unknown reason
            res.error!
        end

    rescue
        # Twitter update failed - check username/password
    end

rescue SocketError
    # Twitter is currently unavailable
end

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 21st, 2007 at 7:28 am and is filed under howto, twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.