Hexo: Publish posts automatically on twitter.

You will never forget to publish post on twitter.

Since I started writing a blog, I started publishing status on Twitter when something new comes out. I did it manually. By profession, I’m a programmer, so doing it started to torture me after a few times. I thought that maybe I could find a plugin on the Internet for this purpose, but unfortunately I was disappointed. (WordPress already has such a plugin ready. :() But I found that I could easily write a plugin and here is ready hexo-twitter-auto-publish plugin. Below are described step by step what you need to do in order to enjoy this solution.

Setup Twitter application for API access

1. Sign in on https://developer.twitter.com/
2. Apply for a developer account.
   Their review of the application may take a few weeks. You will receive an email notification when the review is over.
3. Open menu and go to Apps.
   
4. Click Create an app button.
   
5. Fill in only the required fields of the application.
   
6. After creating the application, go into details by clicking the details button.
   
7. Click on the Keys and tokens tab.
   
8. Generate Consumer API keys and Access token & access token secret with access level Read and write.
   
   The generated credentials will now be needed for the plugin configuration.

Setup hexo plugin

1. Install plugin npm i hexo-twitter-auto-publish

2. Setup twitter authentication credentials
   There are two options to choose:

   • Adding variables to the shell startup file.
     For the bash shell will be ~/.bashrc file for zsh shell will be ~/.zshrc file.

      export TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY=Xegp8XDTMqVxcI2tId1juT70X
      export TWITTER_CONSUMER_SECRET=oaGaU06IGqaTfObZnYdrYmDvxiHcHck8TQ9Xk61Ze1ghjHQYkP
      export TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_KEY=929842798974656517-VuQxIuoLhtoeqW71LofX6M5fIw8Pf3c
      export TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET=R5RZtQj5tLWbSgFx39lq6cd2AcIQRjQk5kbepOobxCplA
     

   • Adding a new configuration in the _config.yml file.

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

After creating the post or after generating the page, you should see the new twitter-db.json file in the main directory. Any post status changes will now be saved in this file.

About twitter-db.json

There are three fields in the database: published, to-publish, to-destroy.

• 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.

If you do not want a post to be sent to twitter, all you have to do is move it from to-publish to published.

New statuses are sent to the twitter only after calling the command: hexo deploy, or after calling a custom command: hexo twitter-publish.

That’s all I hope you liked this plugin and if you have any problems or suggestions what can be done better, write in issues on github.