Hexo-Twitter

Intro

In this article I will go through the setup process to auto publish updates from Hexo into twitter

Context

Due to GDPR regulations I had to make some changes on this blog related with consent as I configured Google Analytics to track visitors of the Website. While researching several hexo plugins and services I introduced several changes that would improve the reach of the articles.

One of the ways is to populate my twitter feed when there are new articles created.

Requirements

This configure requires the usage of hexo . If you don’t know is a blogging framework that converts Markdown into html pages, similar to jekyll
Also you will need to have a twitter dev account

Twitter Dev Account

In order to use the twitter API you need a Dev account, and it seems you need to apply. Check the following URL https://developer.twitter.com and follow the steps in order to have your key.

In your project App you should be able to generate the required secrets for:

TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY
TWITTER_CONSUMER_SECRET
TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_KEY
TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET

This information you be required later

Hexo Plugin

In order to have Hexo auto-publishing to twitter install the following plugin

npm i hexo-twitter-auto-publish

You now have 2 options you can define the following configuration on your _config.yml file:

twitterAutoPublish:
  consumerKey: Xegp8XDTMqVxcI2tId1juT70X
  consumerSecret: fq4eY5NmK2X9ZxSDSUaFqMBPWWMUCCYu35PMvzoqB0YzqLOTEs
  accessTokenKey: 929842798974656517-VuQxIuoLhtoeqW71LofX6M5fIw8Pf3c
  accessTokenSecret: R5RZtQj5tLWbSgFx39lq6cd2AcIQRjQk5kbepOobxCplA

What this does is to trigger the publishing method after each hexo deploy action or you can execute hexo twitter-publish specifically to publish new articles.

Github Actions

In case you use Github Actions to run hexo deploy to deploy your website updates you can setup the following secrets

TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY
TWITTER_CONSUMER_SECRET
TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_KEY
TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET

And update your workflow to include

...
   env:
        TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY: ${{ secrets.TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY }} 
        TWITTER_CONSUMER_SECRET: ${{ secrets.TWITTER_CONSUMER_SECRET }} 
        TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_KEY: ${{ secrets.TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_KEY }} 
        TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET: ${{ secrets.TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET }}

But you will have an issue as this plugin stores information of what was deployed on the following file twitter-db.json and each time you run it will take the status that it has on the master branch, so you would end up re-triggering already published tweets.

If you use this option I would suggest to disable the plugin for including enable: false and only use the hexo twitter-publish directly remembering that this would require an extra step to commit the twitter-db.json update. (I’ll look if there is a better way for this)

First deploy

If you check the twitter-db.json you will understand there are 3 arrays:\

*published - contains posts that are already on twitter and each post has a tweetId.
to-publish - contains all new posts that have not yet appeared on Twitter.
to-destroy - contains posts that for some reason have been moved to a working version, or we changed the twitterAutoPublish in the page from true to false.

I would recommend moving the entries to publish in order to prevent publish old articles you have, or reaching the daily limit in twitter.

Twitter Limitations

Twitter as some limitations for publishing, I will only focus here on the Free Account as there are other tiers with extended functionality and less limitations

Use-case: For write-only use cases and testing the X API

Rate limited access to v2 post posting and media upload endpoints
1,500 Posts per month - posting limit at the app level
1 app ID
Login with X

You also have a daily cap so if you try to push lots of articles at once you will probably bump on that limit

Conclusion

In this article we went through the process of setup Hexo with hexo-twitter-auto-publish which allow automatically publish tweets from the new/updated articles. This can run in deploy mode or directly with hexo twitter-publish command. We also touch some limitations that can be found if integrated with Github Actions. This plugin allows one to extend the reach of the publications.

After searching for available plugins in Hexo this was one of the few that where actually maintained, most of then have more than 6 years without updates and few contributions which makes me think if Jekyll would’ t be a better approach. But that assessment would go for another time

18 Jun, 2024 - About 3 minutes 