Squawk

Squawk gives you a very simple way to keep track of activity on your site.

With Squawk you can keep tabs on what's happening on your website with simple commands like this:

Squawk.user_signed_in! @user

You define the message and see it all happen in real-time on the Twitter account of your choice

Installation

Because Squawk talks to Twitter, it has to run in the background. At least for now, Squawk assumes that you're using delayed_job.

Add Squawk to your Gemfile:

gem 'squawk'

Then create your the initializer config/initializers/squawk.rb:

# Set up all the authorization stuff:
Squawk.twitter_consumer_key    = "..." # Get this from Twitter
Squawk.twitter_consumer_secret = "..." # Get this from Twitter
Squawk.twitter_handle          = "..." # i.e. mycoolproduct_app
Squawk.twitter_access_token    = "..." # Get this from Twitter
Squawk.twitter_secret          = "..." # Get this from Twitter

# Register events you'd like to call in your application with plain old strings:
Squawk.register_event :site_down, "Site just went down"

# Register events that create dynamic alerts:
Squawk.register_event :user_signed_up, lambda { |user| "#{user.name} just signed up" }

# Use Squawk to catch exceptions (useful in those hard to reach places exception apps miss):
Squawk.register_event :error_caught, lambda { |error| "Boom! #{error.message}" }

Usage

Register a new event in config/initializers/squawk.rb:

Squawk.register_event :not_found, "Someone just hit a page that does not exist"

Want a more dynamic message? No problem, use a lambda to construct your own message at runtime:

Squawk.register_event :user_created, lambda { |user| "#{user.name} just created the #{User.count.ordinalize} account" }

Fire an event from anywhere in your app (controller, background job, mailer, go nuts):

Squawk.event_name!

At at time, see all the registered events:

Squawk.events

Notes

Squawk only tweets in production. In non-production environments you can grep the log ("Squawk") to see what it would have tweeted.

Twitter enforces rate limits, so play nice!

This plugin uses Twitter's OAuth, so you need:

  • A Twitter browser-based application (something like " Squawk Gem" with a callback of 'http://127.0.0.1')
  • A protected Twitter account to post activity to (something like "_squawk")
  • Grant access to that account from the Twitter app you created

Installation

This plugin uses Twitter's OAuth, so first you'll need to set up:

  1. A Twitter browser-based application (something like " Squawk Gem" with a callback of 'http://127.0.0.1')
  2. A protected Twitter account to post activity to (something like "_squawk")
  3. Grant access to that account from the Twitter app you created

Unfortunately, to get that last step working is kind of pain:

> require 'twitter'

> consumer_key    = '...' # Your Twitter app's consumer key
> consumer_secret = '...' # Your Twitter app's secret key

> oauth = Twitter::OAuth.new consumer_key, consumer_secret
> oauth.set_callback_url('http://127.0.0.1:3000') # really anything your machine can GET

> request_token  = oauth.request_token.token
> request_secret = oauth.request_token.secret

> authorize_url = oauth.request_token.authorize_url

# Browse to that authorize url.
# You'll be asked to authorize your app. Use the protected Twitter account's credentials.
# Twitter will redirect you back to whatever URL you specified.

> oauth_verifier = '...' # Grab the oauth_verifier from the query parameters of the callback.

> oauth.authorize_from_request(request_token, request_secret, oauth_verifier)

> token  = oauth.access_token.token  # Set this in the initializer as Squawk.twitter_access_token
> secret = oauth.access_token.secret # Set this in the initializer as Squawk.twitter_secret

Please contact me if you find this useful and/or would like to contribute.

Copyright (c) 2010 Avand Amiri, released under the MIT license