A Twitter-Telegram bot in Kotlin
How to use kotlin to build a bot to send Twitter videos to you via Telegram.
Have you ever wondered how Twitter bots work? Can we integrate them with Telegram? Is it possible to do this only with Kotlin?
Fret not! Follow me while we uncover these mysteries!
What we’ll be creating
The idea here is pretty straight forward: A Twitter bot that downloads videos from tweets and sends them to me on Telegram.
Whenever I reply to a post on Twitter that has a video, tagging the bot’s username, the bot will download the video and send it to me on telegram. Simple enough, right? You might have even seen something similar in the wild.
Getting a little more technical
Now that we know what we want, how can we achieve this?
We’ll have an application running locally on our machines that will somehow listen to tweets that mention another user. After being notified of this event, we will need to fetch the video URL from the tweet we’re replying to, download the video and finally send it over to a telegram user using the a bot.
After reading the Twitter developer docs I’ve found they offer 3 possibilities:
(If you’re not familiar with these concepts you can check this article to understand the basics.)
Choosing our tools
Now, since we’re planning to use Kotlin to develop this, the first thing I did before diving-in was a little research (as usual). It seems we have some library options to make this task a little smoother.
Here’s what I found:
- There’s an unofficial Java library for the Twitter API called Twitter4j
- There’s a Java HTTP client for consuming Twitter’s realtime streaming API called HBC
- There’s a wrapper for the Telegram bot API written in Kotlin called kotlin-telegram-bot
Sweet! The job just got a whole lot easier now that we don’t need to build the HTTP clients for any of these.
The only issue is that we don’t have any java/kotlin library to work with the WebHooks api, so we’ll be using the ones above.
Let’s code!
First of all we need to get the keys to play with these services.
To get Twitter keys we’ll need to create a Twitter App, you can get yours here
To get Telegram’s token is just as simple as talking to the BotFather
Hiding keys, tokens and secrets
First, we need a mechanism to load keys, secrets, userIds and tokens used in the project. It is a good practice to keep our keys out of version control.
To do that, we create a json file with all the keys and put it in the resources folder.
{
"consumerKey": "abc1234DEF1234GHI456",
"consumerSecret": "abc1234DEF1234GHI456abc1234DEF1234GHI456",
"token": "0123456789-abc1234DEF1234GHI456",
"tokenSecret": "abc1234DEF1234GHI456abc1234DEF1234GHI456",
"telegramToken": "0123456789:abc1234DEF1234GHI456-abc1234DEF1234GHI456",
"twitterUserId": "012345678901234567890123456789",
"telegramUserId": "01234567890123456789"
}Then, we can use Moshi to simplify deserialization and the AuthLoader class to wrap it up.
Add this to your gradle file
implementation("com.squareup.moshi:moshi:1.9.3")
implementation("com.squareup.moshi:moshi-kotlin:1.9.3")
kapt("com.squareup.moshi:moshi-kotlin-codegen:1.9.3")object MoshiWrapper {
val instance: Moshi = Moshi.Builder()
.add(KotlinJsonAdapterFactory())
.build()
inline fun <reified T : Any> fromJson(type: KClass<T>, json: String): T? {
return instance.adapter(type.java).fromJson(json)
}
}@JsonClass(generateAdapter = true)
data class AuthData(
val consumerKey: String,
val consumerSecret: String,
val token: String,
val tokenSecret: String,
val telegramToken: String,
val twitterUserId: Long,
val telegramUserId: Long
)object AuthLoader {
fun toOAuth(authData: AuthData): OAuth1 {
val (consumerKey, consumerSecret, token, tokenSecret) = authData
return OAuth1(consumerKey, consumerSecret, token, tokenSecret)
}
fun getAuthDataFrom(fileName: String): AuthData {
val fileContent = getFileFromResources("/$fileName")
return MoshiWrapper.fromJson(
AuthData::class,
fileContent
)!!
}
private fun getFileFromResources(fileName: String): String {
val resource = this::class.java.getResource(fileName)
return if (resource == null) {
throw IllegalArgumentException("file not found!")
} else {
File(resource.file).readText()
}
}
}Filtering real time tweets
The docs tell us that we can filter tweets using some parameters like keywords and userIds
In order to do that we can use the HBC-core and HBC-Twitter4j integration.
So, we’ll be using a Twitter4jStatusClient to listen to filtered status updates. This class is a wrapper of HBC’s BasicClient . It is responsible for opening the connection with the Streaming API and to pass filter parameters. The Integration with Twitter4j removes the need to model and deserialize the json responses when receiving status updates.
First we add the dependencies
implementation("com.twitter:hbc-core:2.2.0")
implementation("com.twitter:hbc-twitter4j:2.2.0")
implementation("org.twitter4j:twitter4j-core:4.0.7")
implementation("org.slf4j:slf4j-log4j12:1.6.0") //needed for twitter4j
implementation("io.github.kotlin-telegram-bot.kotlin-telegram-bot:telegram:5.0.0")This is the implementation I came up to simplify consuming this stream:
class FilteredStatusStream(
private val authData: AuthData,
private val filterParams: FilterParams,
private val statusListener: (Status) -> Unit
) {
companion object {
private const val CAPACITY = 1_000
private const val THREAD_POOL_SIZE = 4
}
var statusClient: Twitter4jStatusClient? = null
fun start() {
val (followings, keywords) = filterParams
val filters = createStatusFilters(followings, keywords)
val msgQueue = LinkedBlockingQueue<String>(100 * CAPACITY)
val client = createBasicClient(filters, msgQueue, CAPACITY)
statusClient = createStatusClient(client, msgQueue, THREAD_POOL_SIZE).apply {
connect()
process()
}
}
fun stop() {
statusClient?.stop()
}
private fun createStatusFilters(followings: List<Long>, terms: List<String>) = StatusesFilterEndpoint().apply {
followings(followings)
trackTerms(terms)
}
private fun createStatusClient(
client: BasicClient?,
msgQueue: LinkedBlockingQueue<String>,
poolSize: Int
) = Twitter4jStatusClient(
client,
msgQueue,
listOf(DefaultStatusListener(statusListener)),
Executors.newFixedThreadPool(poolSize)
)
private fun createBasicClient(
endpoint: StatusesFilterEndpoint,
msgQueue: LinkedBlockingQueue<String>,
eventQueueSize: Int
) = ClientBuilder()
.hosts(HttpHosts(Constants.STREAM_HOST))
.authentication(AuthLoader.toOAuth(authData))
.endpoint(endpoint)
.processor(StringDelimitedProcessor(msgQueue))
.eventMessageQueue(LinkedBlockingQueue(eventQueueSize))
.build()
}It looks like a lot, but it is really just configuration code. We’re just hiding the complexity of setting up a Twitter steaming client.
Now we can listen to the tweets from the user with the twitterUserId whenever he mentions the tweeter handle @MandaProZap just by calling:
val authData = AuthLoader.getAuthDataFrom("auth_data.json")
val filterParams = FilterParams(listOf(authData.twitterUserId),listOf("@MandaProZap"))
FilteredStatusStream(authData, filterParams) { newStatus ->
println(newStatus)
}.start()Awesome, right?!😁
But… how do we get the video data? First of all, just a quick recap: We want to get the video from the tweet that we’re replying to.
This newStatus we’re getting from the stream is our own tweet. So we still need to get the parent tweet and it’s video.
Getting media from the parent tweet
Inspecting the Status returned from the stream we can see it’s properties:
private Date createdAt;
private long id;
private String text;
private int displayTextRangeStart = -1;
private int displayTextRangeEnd = -1;
private String source;
private boolean isTruncated;
private long inReplyToStatusId; //This is the one we need
.
..
...Now we can use Twitter4j to fetch the parent tweet.
Again, we can simplify it’s usage with this class:
class TwitterClient(authData: AuthData) {
private val twitter: Twitter = TwitterFactory().instance
init {
twitter.setOAuthConsumer(authData.consumerKey, authData.consumerSecret)
val accessToken = AccessToken(authData.token, authData.tokenSecret)
twitter.oAuthAccessToken = accessToken
}
fun getStatusById(statusId: Long): Status? {
return runCatching { twitter.showStatus(statusId) }.getOrNull()
}
}Finally we can get the video url like this:
val twitterClient = TwitterClient(authData)
twitterClient.getStatusById(newStatus.inReplyToStatusId)
?.mediaEntities
?.mapNotNull { it.videoVariants.firstOrNull()?.url }
?.forEach { url -> println(url)}Almost there now! We just need to send the video to Telegram! But wait… if we send this url… we’ll be sending just an url… not an actual video. We can do better!
Downloading the video
Since we’re using the kotlin-telegram-bot, and it has transitive dependencies to retrofit it seems like a good idea to using it to download the video file.
object FileDownloader {
private val service = Retrofit
.Builder()
.baseUrl("http://localhost/")
.build()
.create(FileDownloadService::class.java)
suspend fun downloadAndWriteToFile(url: String): File? = withContext(Dispatchers.IO) {
val body = service.downloadFileFrom(url).await()
writeToFile(body)
}
private fun writeToFile(responseBody: ResponseBody?): File? = runCatching {
File("${System.currentTimeMillis()}.mp4").apply {
createNewFile()
Okio.buffer(Okio.sink(this)).write(responseBody!!.bytes()!!)
}
}.getOrNull()
}
interface FileDownloadService {
@GET
fun downloadFileFrom(@Url fileUrl: String): Call<ResponseBody?>
}Here we’re creating a FileDownloadService with Retrofit and use it to download the url.
After that we write the data to a file using Okio (also comes bundled with retrofit).
You can see that we’re using coroutines to switch threads while it still looks like synchronous code.
This was achieved with a simple extension function on retrofit’s Call.
suspend fun <T> Call<T>.await(): T {
return suspendCancellableCoroutine { continuation ->
enqueue(object : Callback<T> {
override fun onResponse(call: Call<T>, response: Response<T>) {
if (response.isSuccessful && response.body() != null) {
continuation.resumeWith(Result.success(response.body()!!))
} else {
continuation.resumeWithException(IOException(response.message()))
}
}
override fun onFailure(call: Call<T>, t: Throwable) {
continuation.resumeWithException(t)
}
})
}
}Ok, now we’re downloading the video file. We just need to send it over to Telegram!
Sending the video to Telegram
This is the easiest part thanks to the amazing kotlin-telegram-bot library.
val telegramBot = bot { token = authData.telegramToken }
telegramBot.sendVideo(authData.telegramUserId, videoFile)Putting it all together
fun main() {
val authData = AuthLoader.getAuthDataFrom("auth_data.json")
val filterParams = FilterParams(listOf(authData.twitterUserId),listOf("@MandaProZap"))
val twitterClient = TwitterClient(authData)
val telegramBot = bot { token = authData.telegramToken }
FilteredStatusStream(authData, filterParams) { newStatus ->
twitterClient.getStatusById(newStatus.inReplyToStatusId)
?.mediaEntities
?.mapNotNull { it.videoVariants.firstOrNull()?.url }
?.forEach { url ->
GlobalScope.launch {
FileDownloader.downloadAndWriteToFile(url)?.let { videoFile ->
telegramBot.sendVideo(authData.telegramUserId, videoFile)
}
}
}
}.start()
}fun main() {
val authData = AuthLoader.getAuthDataFrom("auth_data.json")
val filterParams = FilterParams(listOf(authData.twitterUserId),listOf("@MandaProZap"))
val twitterClient = TwitterClient(authData)
val telegramBot = bot { token = authData.telegramToken }
FilteredStatusStream(authData, filterParams) { newStatus ->
twitterClient.getStatusById(newStatus.inReplyToStatusId)
?.mediaEntities
?.mapNotNull { it.videoVariants.firstOrNull()?.url }
?.forEach { url ->
GlobalScope.launch {
FileDownloader.downloadAndWriteToFile(url)?.let { videoFile ->
telegramBot.sendVideo(authData.telegramUserId, videoFile)
}
}
}
}.start()
}Summing it all up!
Yes, we can create a twitter-telegram bot with Kotlin while keeping it fairly simple.
Taking advantage of these libraries make the experience a lot smoother and adding some wrappers on top of it helps to hide the complexity and enable us to create a declarative API to let us focus on what matters.
The next step here is to implement this idea using the WebHook API, but this will have to be in a another post.
I hope you learned something along the way, I certainly did!
You can check the project on github.