Tweeting with an image using Node JS

Introduction

This is my fourth tutorial about using Twitter API with Node JS. My previous tutorials are listed up there 👆.

In my first tutorial, I showed how to tweet with only text using Twitter API and Node JS, see here.
Then I got a question on how to tweet with an image, thanks to @thomasbnt and @generativexbot , so here I'll explain my way to do this.

Before we start

You need to have a Twitter Developer account and for the basic configurations please go here for more explanation as I follow the same structure.

Let's start

To tweet an image, the process will consist of two requests:
1- Uploading the image
2- Tweeting with that image

• The new thing here is that each request uses a different subdomain in the Twitter API url, which means that a small change will be done on the config.js file.

const twitter = require('twitter-lite'); exports.newClient = function (subdomain = 'api') { return new twitter({ subdomain, consumer_key: '', consumer_secret: '', access_token_key: '', access_token_secret: '' }); } 

• Here I changed the configurations to be returned as a function instead of a JSON object. The function returns a twitter lite client that I moved its definition here for simplicity. The reason I did that is the new configuration attribute subdomain, which can be set from the function parameter.

-Now, we are ready to edit the index.js file. Some changes must be made after changing the config.js file:
1- Remove twitter lite definition
2- Define twitter lite clients for both subdomains to be used later

const apiClient = config.newClient(); const uploadClient = config.newClient('upload'); 

• I got this photo to be used with the tweet
  

• Then we deal with the image file and make it ready for the upload by defining the fs and path modules.
  

const fs = require('fs'); const path = require('path'); 

• Then, read the file as a 64 based file.

const mediaFile = fs.readFileSync(path.join(__dirname, 'hello_world.png')); const base64image = Buffer.from(mediaFile).toString('base64'); 

• Next, it's similar to what we did in this tutorial where a request is depending on the result of another request.

• The first request is for uploading image using media/upload endpoint and the uploading subdomain. This means using uploadClient here and returns an object with media_id attribute which we save for the next step.
  

// Uploading an image uploadClient.post('media/upload', { media_data: base64image }) .then(media => { console.log('You successfully uploaded media'); var media_id = media.media_id_string; }).catch(console.error); 

• You can see full details for this request here.

• The second request is the normal tweeting using statuses/update endpoint to tweet with the image, which uses the apiClient.
  

// tweeting with text and image apiClient.post('statuses/update', { status: 'Hello world!', media_ids: media_id }) .then(tweet => { console.log('Your image tweet is posted successfully'); }).catch(console.error); 

• You can see full details for this request here.

• everything in place now and we can run the app in Command Prompt using:
  

node index.js 

• That's it and your image is added to your tweet and takes its place in your friends timeline 😁.

Here's is the full code for index.js file:

const fs = require('fs'); const path = require('path'); const config = require('./config'); const apiClient = config.newClient(); const uploadClient = config.newClient('upload'); const mediaFile = fs.readFileSync(path.join(__dirname, 'hello_world.png')); const base64image = Buffer.from(mediaFile).toString('base64'); uploadClient.post('media/upload', { media_data: base64image }) .then(media => { console.log('You successfully uploaded media'); var media_id = media.media_id_string; apiClient.post('statuses/update', { status: 'Hello world!', media_ids: media_id }) .then(tweet => { console.log('Your image tweet is posted successfully'); }).catch(console.error); }).catch(console.error); 

In the following tutorial, we are going to explore more about twitter API. I have several ideas to share with you, so stay tuned 😉

For the full code, you can visit my github page.

If you like my tutorials, support me here and follow me on Twitter