Tweet2Hugo

This python script fetches the latest tweet of a public user from twitter and outputs a json file to Hugo's data directory. This script expects two json files in /etc/tw2hugo, which should have chmod 700 for a non-privileged user and no rights for the group. All files should have chmod 400.

Setup

This package depends only on the pip package "requests", which I recommend to simply install globally with pip3 install requests. You can also use the provided pipfile and install all dependencies into a virtual environment with pipenv lock, however, you will need to activate that environment in your automation script.

Next, you will need to install the configuration files below:

Needed configuration files

/etc/tw2hugo/mail_credentials.json

{
  "enable": true,
  "smtp-server": "mail server",
  "smtp-port": 465,
  "email-user": "username for smtp",
  "email-sendfrom": "sender mail",
  "email-password": "passw0rd",
  "email-sendto": "receiving mail"
}

/etc/tw2hugo/twitter.json

{
    "bearer": "bearer token of your twitter app",
    "twitter-handle": "twitter handle",
    "output-location": "/hugo/project/directory/data/latest_tweet.json",
    "exclude": [
        "dontincludethishastag",
        "politics"
    ]
}

Why does it need email credentials?

The script has the specialty that sends an email when something goes wrong, so I am notifed and can fix the issue. If you don't want that, replace enable: true in the mail_credentials.json with false.

How does it integrate into Hugo?

It puts the full json reply from twitter into the data directory, if correctly configured. From there you can do two things:

• Automate the build (strongly recommended)
• Build a template that uses the json data to build a twitter card.

I build the template using a partial template. It sits in the directory layouts/partials and is called latest_tweet.html. The content is not very interesting:

<div class="box has-text-white brdr-yayellow bg-darkslate">
    <div class="content p-4">
        {{ with .Site.Data.latest_tweet }}
        <div class="columns">
            <div class="column is-half is-offset-one-quarter">
                <figure class="image is-128x128 is-centered">
                     <img class="is-rounded" src="/images/twitter_profile.webp">
                </figure>
            </div>
        </div>
        <p class="has-text-centered">
            <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow noreferrer noopener" href="https://twitter.com/{{.user.name}}">
                @{{ .user.name }}
            </a>
        </p>
        <hr class="twitter-hr">
        <p class="mt-5 has-text-justified">
            {{ .full_text | safeHTML }}
        </p>
        <hr class="twitter-hr">

        <div class="level mb-0">
            <span class="level-left">
                <a target="_blank" 
                   rel="nofollow noreferrer noopener" 
                   href="https://twitter.com/{{.user.name}}/status/{{.id_str}}">{{ slicestr .created_at 0 20 }}
                </a>
            </span>
            <span class="level-right">
               via {{ .source | safeHTML }}
            </span>
        </div>
        <hr class="twitter-hr">
        <div class="level">
            <span class="level-item is-size-4 mr-5">
                <a href="https://twitter.com/intent/like?tweet_id={{.id_str}}">
                    <span class="icon"><i class="fas fa-heart"></i></span>
                </a>
            </span>
            <span class="level-item is-size-4 mr-5">
                <a href="https://twitter.com/intent/retweet?tweet_id={{.id_str}}">
                    <span class="icon"><i class="fas fa-retweet"></i></span>
                </a>
            </span>
            <span class="level-item is-size-4 mr-5">
                <a href="https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?in_reply_to={{.id_str}}">
                    <span class="icon"><i class="fas fa-reply"></i></span>
                </a>
            </span>
        </div>
        {{ end }}
    </div>
</div>

The important bit is this go template instruction:

{{ with .Site.Data.latest_tweet }}
{{ end }}

Between these you can call the keys from the json, so name in dict user becomes simply {{ .user.name }}.
Neato, isn't it? If you want to know how it looks like, head over to my website and scroll down to the footer.

Excluding hashtags

Sometimes you do not want a tweet to decorate the hard work you call your web home. You can edit the following in twitter.json to exclude certain hashtags:

"exclude": [
    "politics"
]

You find sample configuration files in the /etc/ folder in the project root.