Building a Twitter Filter With CherryPy, Redis, and tweetstream
2010-03-18 23:04:54
Background
Since reading this post by Simon Willison I've been interested in Redis and have been following its development. After having a quick play around with Redis I've been looking for a project to work on that uses Redis as a data store. I then came across this blog post by Mirko Froehlich, in which he shows the steps and code to create a Twitter filter using Redis as the datastore and Sinatra as the web app. This blog post will explain how I created queshuns.com in Python and the various listed tools below.
Tools
- tweetstream - provides the interface to the Twitter Streaming API
- CherryPy - used for handling the web app side, no need for an ORM
- Jinja2 - HTML templating
- jQuery - for doing the AJAXy stuff and visual effects
- redis-py - Python client for Redis
-
Redis - the "database", look here for the documenation on how to install it
Retrieving tweets
The first thing we need to is retrieve tweets from the Twitter Streaming API. Thankfully there
is already a Python module that provides a nice interface called tweetstream. For more
information about tweetstream look at the Cheeseshop page for its usage guide.
Here is the code for the filter_daemon.py, which when executed as a script from the command-line
will start streaming tweets from Twitter that contain the words "why", "how", "when", "lol", "feeling"
and the tweet must end in a question mark.
In this script I define a class, FilterRedis which I use to abstract some methods that will
be used by both filter_daemon.py and later by the web app itself.
The important part of this class is the push method, which will push data onto the tail of a Redis list. It also keeps a count of items and when it goes over the threshold of 100 items, it will trim starting from the head and the first 20th elements (or the oldest tweets).
The schema for the tweet data that gets pushed into the Redis list is a dictionary of values that gets jsonified (we can probably use then new Redis hash type);
{ 'id':"the tweet id", 'text':"text of the tweet", 'username':", 'userid':"userid", 'name': "name of the twitter user", 'profile_image_url': "url to profile image", 'received_at':time.time() }
'received_at' is important because we will be using that to find new tweets to display in the web app.
Web App
I picked CherryPy to write the web application, because I wanted to learn it for the future
when I need to write a small web frontends that dont need an ORM. Also, CherryPy has a built-in
HTTP server that is sufficient for websites with small loads, which I initially used to run
queshuns.com it is now being run with mod_python. For templating, I used Jinja2 because its similair
in syntax to the Django templating language that I am familiar with.
The following is the code for questions_app.py which is the CherryPy application.
The index (method) of the web app will get the all the tweets from Redis. The other exposed
function is latest which accepts an argument since which is used to get
tweets that are newer (_since_ is the latest tweets received_at value). nt is
used to create a different URL each time so that IE doesn't cache it. This method returns
JSON at.
The templates are located in a directory called templates :)
Here is the template for the root/index of the site; index.jinja
This template will be used to render a list of tweets and also assign the first
tweets recieved_at value to a variable on the window object. This is used by
the refreshTweets function which will pass it on to /latest in a GET parameter.
refreshTweets will try to get new tweets and prepend it to the content div
and then slide the latest tweets. This is the template used to render the HTML
for the latest tweets;
I explicitly set the the latest div to "display: none" so that I can animate it.
Now we should be able to run questions_daemon.py to start retrieving tweets then start questions_app.py to look at the web app. On your browser go to http://localhost:8080/ and if everything went correctly you should see a list of tweets that update every 10 seconds.
Thats it. Hope this was helpful.
