twarc-cloud

Docs: http://twarc-cloud.readthedocs.io/

An AWS-friendly wrapper for Twarc for collecting Twitter data from Twitter's API.

Twarc-Cloud is a CLI that manages AWS Fargate Elastic Container Service (ECS) tasks that retrieve Twitter data from Twitter's API and stores in AWS S3 storage.

Collecting from the following Twitter API methods is supported:

• GET statuses/user_timeline
• GET search/tweets.json
• POST statuses/filter

Design principles

• Serverless: No server to maintain or pay for when not in use.
• Use as few AWS services as possible: To reduce complexity and cost.

Thus, there is no web server, database, message queue, etc.

AWS costs

As of March 2019, the costs for the used AWS services are:

• Fargate ECS: (1/4 CPU x $0.04048 per CPU per hour) + 1/2 GB x $0.004445 per GB per hour) = $0.012345 per harvest per hour
• S3: $0.023 per GB per month

Costs will vary depending on how much data you collect. However, overall it is ridiculously cheap.

Unit tests and linting

First:

pip install pylint

then:

python -m unittest discover
pylint *.py twarccloud tests

Twarc-Cloud is currently under-tested; writing new tests is a priority.

Docker

The Docker image justinlittman/twarc-cloud is set to autobuild on commit:

• latest is master.
• version-<major> is the most recent tagged major version.
• version-<major.minor.patch> is the most recent tagged version.

A Twarc-Cloud harvester running as an ECS task is tied to a major version; each time a new ECS task is started, the most recent Docker image is pulled. Any breaking change will result in a new major version.

To manually build and push a Docker image:

docker build . -t 'justinlittman/twarc-cloud:latest'
docker push justinlittman/twarc-cloud:latest

Documentation

To install the requirements:

pip install sphinx recommonmark sphinx-autobuild sphinx_rtd_theme

To run a live version of the docs:

cd docs
make livehtml

A live version of the docs will available on http://localhost:8000.

Release process

1. Update version in twarccloud/__init__.py.
2. Commit and push.
3. Tag a release in Github named with the version, e.g., 1.0.0.

Acknowledgements

Twarc-Cloud is inspired by and borrows heavily from DocNow's Twarc and George Washington University Libraries' Social Feed Manager.