EM-Twitter

EM-Twitter is an EventMachine-based ruby client for the Twitter Streaming API.

Usage

require 'em-twitter'

options = {
  :path   => '/1/statuses/filter.json',
  :params => { :track => 'yankees' },
  :oauth  => {
    :consumer_key     => ENV['CONSUMER_KEY'],
    :consumer_secret  => ENV['CONSUMER_SECRET'],
    :token            => ENV['OAUTH_TOKEN'],
    :token_secret     => ENV['OAUTH_TOKEN_SECRET']
  }
}

EM.run do
  client = EM::Twitter::Client.connect(options)

  client.each do |result|
    puts result
  end
end

SSL

SSL is used by default (EventMachine defaults to verify_peer => false), and can be configured:

options = {
  :ssl => {
    :private_key_file => "path/to/key.pem",
    :cert_chain_file => "path/to/cert.pem",
    :verify_peer => true
  }
}

client = EM::Twitter.Client.connect(options)

Proxy Support

EM-Twitter includes proxy support via a configuration option:

options = {
  :proxy => {
    :username => 'myusername',
    :passowrd => 'mypassword',
    :uri => 'http://my-proxy:8080'
  }
}

client = EM::Twitter.Client.connect(options)

Error Handling

EM-Twitter supports the following callbacks for handling errors:

on_unauthorized
on_forbidden
on_not_found
on_not_acceptable
on_too_long
on_range_unacceptable
on_enhance_your_calm (aliased as on_rate_limited)

Errors callbacks are invoked on a Client like so:

client = EM::Twitter.Client.connect(options)
client.on_forbidden do
  puts 'oops'
end

Reconnections

EM-Twitter has two callbacks for reconnection handling:

client = EM::Twitter.Client.connect(options)
client.on_reconnect do |timeout, count|
  # called each time the client reconnects
end

client.on_max_reconnects do |timeout, count|
  # called when the client has exceeded either:
  # 1. the maximum number of reconnect attempts
  # 2. the maximum timeout limit for reconnections
end

Stream Processing

We recommend using TweetStream for a higher abstraction level interface.

REST

To access the Twitter REST API, we recommend the Twitter gem.

Todo

Gzip encoding support (see issue #1 for more information)
JSON Parser (see issue #2 for more information)

Inspiration

EM-Twitter is heavily inspired by Vladimir Kolesnikov's twitter-stream. I learned an incredible amount from studying his code and much of the reconnection handling in EM-Twitter is derived/borrowed from his code as are numerous other bits. Eloy Durán's ssalleyware was very helpful in adding SSL Certificate verification as was David Graham's vines.

Testing with EM can be a challenge, but was made incredibly easy through the use of Hayes Davis' awesome mockingbird gem.