Pretweeting

Pretweeting is now open source! All the code needed to deploy an instance of the game pretweeting is in this repository.

Requirements

• Django 1.0+
• Python 2.4+
• MySQL
• Memcached
• Python libraries: pytz, pexpect

Installation

To set up a local instance of pretweeting, follow the following steps.

1. Download the source code to a directory on your local machine.

2. Set up an empty MySQL database.

3. Set up a (twitter oAuth client)[http://twitter.com/oauth] and remember the key/secret.

4. Fill out the pretweeting/apps/config/environment/local.py file with appropriate settings for your database and twitter access. You'll need:

    # for database access
    DATABASE_USER = '---'
    DATABASE_PASSWORD = '---'
    DATABASE_HOST = ''
   
    # for local data storage
    LOCAL_DATA_DIR = "/Users/Gabe/pretweeting_data"
    BULK_INSERT_DIR = "/Users/Gabe/pretweeting_data/bulk_insert"
   
    # for accessing the streaming API
    TWITTER_USERNAME = '---'
    TWITTER_PASSWORD = '---'
   
    # for tweeting and DMing from pretweeting account
    TWITTER_OAUTH_TOKEN = '---'
    TWITTER_DM_SCREENNAME = '---'
   
    # for twitter authorization
    CONSUMER_KEY = '---'
    CONSUMER_SECRET = '---'
   

5. Run python manage.py syncdb to create the database tables.

6. Run python manage.py runserver to start the web server. At this point you should be able to navigate to localhost:8000 to see a game with empty data running.

7. To start the feed from twitter, you'll need to run two scripts continuously.

   • pretweeting/scripts/consume.py opens a connection to the garden hose and files away batches of data into a folder in your local data data directory.
   • pretweeting/scripts/process.py regularly consumes those data batch files and pushes them into the database.

Once you have the webserver and feed scripts running, that should be all you need! You can change parameters like how frequently prices are updated in the pretweeting/apps/config/environment/local.py file.

Steps for setting up a remote server are largely similar. Let me know if you have any difficulties! Happy pretweeting!