HW4 EC500

By: Ruby Zaveri

Main Exercise

Using the twitter feed, construct a daily video summarizing a twitter handle's day.

• Convert text into an image in a frame
• Do a sequence of all texts and images in chronological order.
• Display each video frame for 3 seconds

Tasks

Establish a processing criteria:

• How many API calls you can handle simultaneously and why?
• For example, run different API calls at the same time?
• Split the processing of an API into multiple threads?

Recommendation for working on the homework:

Step 1:

Develop a queue system that can exercise your requirements with stub functions.

This was accomplished by adding each API call to a processing queue. The queue contains a unique id associated with the request. Each process is associated with a single thread that executes requests. The threads all exectue the all_tweets function, the thread calls form the processing queue and calls other functions that help to transform tweets to videos.

The /video/<name> route will return the result of the image2vid function.

And each call the main directory is wiped using the delete_all function to prevent duplicates in the system.

Step 2:

Develop the twitter functionality with an API

This was accoplished using flask and the tweepy api. The function all_tweets returns an array of all of the tweets from the current day of the given username. If there are no tweets the webpage returns an error.

Step 3:

Integrate them

Include tracking interface to show how many processes are going on and success of each

This was accomplished by having a /status route that returns the status of each API call - processing, queuing or finished.

Prerequisites

Setup your config /config.py file as shown

TWITTER_API_KEY = XXXXXXXXX
TWITTER_API_SECRET_KEY = XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN = XXXXXXXXX
TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET = XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Installing

Install requirements

pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Running the Program

Run the command

python3 api.py

Then navigate to http://127.0.0.1:5000/video/Tweeter_Handle_Here Please make sure to put a twitter handle in the url or you will get an error.

To track the progress of the API calls please go to http://127.0.0.1:5000/status

Tests

To test the program run

pytest test_code.py

If you do not have a keys file the tests will not run as they test api outputs.