How we Automated our 100DaysOfCode Daily Tweet

In this article I show you a way to automatically tweet your #100DaysOfCode Challenge progress. This saves you some extra time to focus on the coding. Isn’t that all what matters?

This is day 007 of our 100 Days of Code challenge. You can follow along by forking our repo.

Getting ready

You need pytz, tweepy and requests. You can pip install -r requirements.txt if you cloned our repo (after cd-ing in 007). We recommend using virtualenv to isolate environments.

As explained in a previous article you need to get a Consumer Key/Secret and Access Token (Secret) from Twitter. I added those to my .bashrc which I load in via os.environ in config.py. There I also started a logging handler I use to log outgoing tweets and any exceptions that may occur.

The main script

See here and below what I learned:

• As per PEP8 we import stdlib, followed by external modules and own project modules:

  import datetime
  import os
  import re
  import sys
  
  import requests
  import pytz
  
  from config import logging, api
  

• My server (see deployment below) runs on MT tz and I wanted to talk EMEA times. Pytz (World Timezone Definitions for Python) to the rescue: it made working with timezones very easy:

  tz = pytz.timezone('Europe/Amsterdam')
  now = datetime.datetime.now(tz)
  start = datetime.datetime(2017, 3, 29, tzinfo=tz)  # = PyBites 100 days :)
  

• I define some constants in all capital letters with underscores separating words (PEP8). I start to like datetime: calculating dates is easy:

  CURRENT_CHALLENGE_DAY = str((now - start).days).zfill(3)
  LOG = 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pybites/100DaysOfCode/master/LOG.md'
  LOG_ENTRY = re.compile(r'\[(?P