Send a tweet with Node.js

Project setup

This assumes you're working in a Node.js project. If you don't have one, create an empty folder folder and run npm init -y. Then install these two dependencies:

npm install twitter-api-v2
npm install --save-dev dotenv
bash

Setup Twitter credentials

You'll need to create a Twitter account if you don't have one already.

Then go to the Twitter API and create a new App with Read and Write access under 'User authentication settings' (more info on that here).

There are 4 credentials you need to save in order to send tweets via the API. The API key and secret are shown when you create the app - store those in a safe location. Those give you basic access to the API.

Then to get the access token and secret for sending tweets: within the App settings, under the Keys and tokens tab, under Authentication Tokens click 'Generate' and save the access token & secret.

Then create a .env file with the app's key and secret, and the access token and secret:

TWITTER_API_KEY=
TWITTER_API_SECRET=

TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN=
TWITTER_ACCESS_SECRET=
text

The sendTweet function

Now you're good to go. Then put this in a file, eg tweet.ts:

require('dotenv').config();
import { TwitterApi } from 'twitter-api-v2';

const twitterUserConfig = {
  appKey: process.env.TWITTER_API_KEY ?? '',
  appSecret: process.env.TWITTER_API_SECRET ?? '',
  accessToken: process.env.TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN,
  accessSecret: process.env.TWITTER_ACCESS_SECRET,
};

const userClient = new TwitterApi(twitterUserConfig);

export const sendTweet = async (text: string) => {
  try {
    await userClient.v1.tweet(text);
    return true;
  } catch (err) {
    console.log('Error sending tweet:', err);
  }
  return false;
};
typescript

And that's all you need to send automated tweets! You'd call this function in another file like this:

import { sendTweet } from './twitter';

(async () => {
  await sendTweet("I no longer have a manager. I can't be managed");
})();
typescript