Today I'm gonna show how to make the basis for a bot like my own doomybot. It's actually pretty easy!

Project Outline

This is the kind of quality output we can expect from the bot we are creating today -

This set of tutorials will be broken up into several different components. In this one, We'll get up-and-running with the Tumblr API and make a very simple bot that posts random sentences. In the future, we'll outline how to answer asks, reblog posts, and do more advanced robot-like things.

Programming is a super-broad topic that I can't really cover in one tutorial, so if you're interested in learning more Ruby, a great place to start is Codecademy. In order to fully understand everything we're doing, a little programming knowledge is helpful. However, if you're completely new to all of this, you should be able to follow along just fine anyways.

Setting Up

We need a couple things to start with. Setting up will be slightly different depending on whether you're on a Mac/*nix system or Windows. I greatly prefer *nix systems for this sort of stuff to Windows, but it can be done.

Installing Ruby

The first thing we need to do is install Ruby, the programming language we will use.

On Macs:

Follow the guide here. I don't own a Mac, so this isn't tested! But it should work. Basically, we're installing RVM and then Ruby.

On Unix / Linux Systems

On Linux and Unix systems, these commands can change based on your distribution. But generally, you can follow this guide on the RVM site.

gpg --keyserver hkp://keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys 409B6B1796C275462A1703113804BB82D39DC0E3
\curl -sSL https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable

Once you've installed RVM, get a new shell and type in rvm install ruby. If all goes well, you will be a proud owner of the Ruby language.

On Windows

Windows kind of sucks for Ruby, okay? It's great for .NET stuff, and pretty good at Python, but Ruby on Windows has some problems. My recommendation is to install Virtualbox for Windows, and then install a distribution of Linux like Ubuntu onto Virtualbox. After that, follow the steps for Unix / Linux Systems above.

Because it's not reasonable to ask beginners to learn a whole new operating system, a Windows option still exists if you're persistent! RubyInstaller for Windows will package everything up nicely for you. Select to install Ruby 2.3.1. Note that you'll also need to install the DevKit. I also will not cover Windows-specific examples below - for instance, the cd command line tool is equivalent to dir in Windows, so not everything will work copy-and-pasted.

When the installer asks where you'd like to install Ruby, make sure you check Add Ruby executables to your PATH.

Setting Up our Environment

We need to install a couple more things to get up and running. Open up a new console window (Terminal in Mac and Command Prompt in Windows). Type the following.

gem install bundle

bundle is our package manager. It will keep track of all the software stuff we need in our project.

Lets also create a folder to store our project. This can be anywhere, and can be named anything (although it's helpful to avoid spaces and special characters) -

mkdir tumblr_bot

We also will need a text editor to write everything with. If you have one you prefer, use it! (I like vim), but if you're unsure, I recommend using Visual Studio Code. It's pretty good and runs on almost anything.

Getting started

Create a few new folders in your project directory. They will be titled bin and lib. Also, create a new file called Gemfile in your project root.

• bin: this is where we'll store the stuff that actually runs our bot.
• lib: this is where we'll store all the code.
• Gemfile: this is where we'll store everything we'll need for the bundle command to work. It keeps a list of what software packages our project needs to run. This file is especially vital if we want to share our program with other people. Note that Gemfile has NO file extension. It's just Gemfile!, not Gemfile.txt.

Your folder structure should look something like this.

Lets open our lib folder and add a new file named whatever the root folder is called. My root folder is named tumblr_bot, so I'm going to add a new file called tumblr_bot.rb. The .rb extension lets us know this is a Ruby file.

Note: it doesn't really matter what this file is called, but I'm sticking to a convention often used in the creation of Ruby packages. This will make your life easier down the line if you decide to author more Ruby projects.

Creating the base of our project

Let's open up tumblr_bot.rb in the text editor of our choice. In this file, we're going to put the following -

puts 'jello world'

And that's it for now. Lets run it! Go back to your root directory, and run the following:

ruby ./lib/tumblr_bot.rb

If all goes well, we should receive this output:

jello world

puts, or Put String, is the way to echo stuff to the console in Ruby.

Setting up our Tumblr Account

First, lets create a new sub-blog. This is easy enough from the Tumblr dashboard. Name it anything you like, but remember the name. You can also use your main blog, but some people might get confused if they get a pile of gibberish all over their dashboards. Or that might just be normal. Who knows.

In order to use your Tumblr account with custom code, you'll need to obtain an API key. Log into Tumblr, and visit this link. Click "Register Application".

You only need to fill out a few fields.

Application Name: Whatever you want! Name it something more creative than "TestBot".

Application Website: If you're not a member of the elite few to own a website yet, you can just use your Tumblr blog URL.

Application Description: Again, whatever you want.

Administrative contact email: You should make this something you actually use just in case Tumblr needs to notify you about something.

Default callback URL: We won't be using this parameter for our application, but it's still required. You can put any valid URI here.

And that's it! Submit the form, and you'll have a new thing. Find your new app, and click the Show OAuth Consumer Secret. It should look like this except with a bunch of random characters instead of xxxxx.

We have to do one more thing before we're ready to roll. Visit the Tumblr API Console with your Consumer Key and Consumer Secret on hand. Input them into their respective input boxes, and hit "Authenticate".

Note: This content is super-sensitive. Treat it like you would a password.

After you give access, you should be presented with a page that looks like this:

Navigate to the tab that conveniently says Ruby!

Copy this entire code section into your clipboard.

Adding Tumblr to our App

With the code in our clipboard, lets move back to our tumblr_bot.rb file. We can delete everything we added to this file before, and replace it with the code we just got from Tumblr. Our tumblr_bot.rb file should now look like this:

# Authenticate via OAuth
client = Tumblr::Client.new({
  :consumer_key => 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx',
  :consumer_secret => 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx',
  :oauth_token => 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx',
  :oauth_token_secret => 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx'
})

# Make the request
client.info 

Great! Lets try and run it. We'll do the same thing as last time; navigate to our root directory, open a console, and type in the following command.

ruby ./lib/tumblr_bot.rb

If all goes to plan, we should get an error! Woo.

lib/tumblr_bot.rb:2:in `<main>': uninitialized constant Tumblr (NameError)

This is because we need the official Tumblr Ruby package. Remember when we created our Gemfile and installed bundle? We're about to use both these tools.

Open up your Gemfile and add the following lines:

source 'https://rubygems.org'
gem 'tumblr_client'

Save the file, and get back to the terminal opened up in your root directory. Lets type this behemoth of a command:

bundle

Bundle is the package we installed earlier. It looks through our Gemfile file and adds any necessary packages to our system. This could take a minute or two to complete.

We now have the Tumblr Ruby package installed on our system, but we have to specifically tell our file that we need to use it. Open up tumblr_bot.rb again, and add the following line to the top of the file:

require 'tumblr_client'

We also need to modify the last line. Change it from this

client.info

to this

puts client.info

If you remember from before, puts will output our item to a string we can read. Without the puts statement, the line would execute silently.

Your entire tumblr_bot.rb should look like this now:

require 'tumblr_client'

# Authenticate via OAuth
client = Tumblr::Client.new({
  :consumer_key => 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx',
  :consumer_secret => 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx',
  :oauth_token => 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx',
  :oauth_token_secret => 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx'
})

# Make the request
puts client.info 

Tip: when a line is preceded by the # symbol, the line is a comment, meaning that code is not executed. You can use this to write yourself little notes.

Lets get back to our root console, and type the following command yet again:

ruby ./lib/tumblr_bot.rb

Andddddd..... We should get a response! A response with a bunch of weird characters and symbols, but some readable text. If you do some reading, you should see some stuff that looks familiar.

{"user"=>{"name"=>"doomy", "likes"=>36042, "following"=>464, "default_post_format"=>"html", "blogs"=>[{"title"=>"meme machine", "name"=>"doomy", "total_posts"=>43367, "posts"=>43367, "url"=>"http://doomy.me/", "updated"=>1469145521, "description"=>"hi im alexander\nI made doomybot\n19 /  design student / developer / composer / certified funnyman / and more \nask\nmy music tag\nsoundcloudamazon wishlist",
...

It's all jumbled up in a bunch of {s and ", but this is definitely my blog! You should see stuff that belongs to your own blog.

This is the result of the client.info command on which we prepended puts. The client.info command just gets info about us! This is cool and all, but let's make it a little more bot-like.

Posting a thing

Bots autopost stuff! It's what they do best. So lets implement the same functionality.

Open up your tumblr_bot.rb file, and delete the line we just edited:

puts client.info 

We're going to replace it with some new commands. Copy and paste the following, and add it to the end of your file:

client.text("YOUR_SUBBLOG_HERE", title: "Jello World", body: "I am the jello maestro.")

This will make our entire file look like this:

require 'tumblr_client'

# Authenticate via OAuth
client = Tumblr::Client.new({
  :consumer_key => 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx',
  :consumer_secret => 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx',
  :oauth_token => 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx',
  :oauth_token_secret => 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx'
})

# Make the request
client.text("YOUR_SUBBLOG_HERE", title: "Jello World", body: "I am the jello maestro.")

So what does it all mean?

client: This is something called a variable in programming. Basically, it takes the easy-to-remember word client and sets it to the value of a big long Tumblr code that we can easily use later.

client.text: The Tumblr variable client we stored beforehand as a bunch of nifty functions we can use by appending a .. The text function allows us to create a text post, believe it or not.

all that stuff after the client.text thing: The data after our client.text thing are just parameters (or settings) for the .text function. These parameters are surrounded in parenthesis, and are separated by commas. Here, we're setting the blog we want to post to, then the title of our post, and then the body text of our post. Note that you HAVE to own the blog or subblog you post to. Don't try to post with the staff account, it won't work (probably).

Alright! Let's go ahead and run our code.

ruby ./lib/tumblr_bot.rb

And... Nothing? Well, we didn't puts anything out to the console, so the program should just run and quit when it finished. But let's visit the blog name we provided in the client.text function. With any luck, it should look like this!

Nice! We just posted some stuff from a script we wrote. But we can make it even cooler.

Making our Bot Post Things That Make our Mom Worry that We're Doing Illegal Drugs

Let's create something fun - a bot that defines a real-world object, and then assigns an alignment to that object. We're going to add a few lines of code. Here's what the file will look like:

require 'tumblr_client'

# Authenticate via OAuth
client = Tumblr::Client.new({
  :consumer_key => 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx',
  :consumer_secret => 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx',
  :oauth_token => 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx',
  :oauth_token_secret => 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx'
})

alignments = ["Lawful Good", 
                "Neutral Good", 
                "Chaotic Good", 
                "Lawful Neutral",
                "True Neutral",
                "Chaotic Neutral",
                "Lawful Evil",
                "Neutral Evil",
                "Chaotic Evil" ]

adjectives = ["Cool", "Gamer", "Doctor", "Pathetic"]
nouns = ["Boy", "Pineapple Ham", "Child", "Gluestick", "Muffin"]

sentence = "#{alignments.sample}: #{adjectives.sample} #{nouns.sample}."

# Make the request
client.text("doomybottest", title: sentence)

It looks like a lot of stuff, but it's not too hard! We have four basic variables - alignments, adjectives, nouns, and sentence.

• The alignments variable holds all the possibilities in the alignments chart.

• The adjectives variable holds a list of, well, adjectives. You can fill these in with whatever you want. It doesn't strictly have to be adjectives, but try to choose items that sort of make sense given the context.

• The nouns variable holds a list of words that we can place after an item from the adjectives list.

• The sentence variable puts the alignments, adjectives, and nouns selections in one string.

You might be wondering, what is this weird syntax?

thing = ["stuff", "woah"]

First of all, we need to surround any text in quotes, like "stuff". If we just used plain-old stuff, ruby would think we're looking for a variable called stuff, when that doesn't exist!

Also when we have a variable that is going to hold more than one thing, we need to use something called an array. To create an array, we surround everything in the array with square brackets, and separate items with a comma.

Secondly, what's up with the sentence variable?

sentence = "#{alignments.sample}: #{adjectives.sample} #{nouns.sample}."

First, when we call the .sample (a function of each array), Ruby nicely gets a random item from our array! So, nouns.sample gets one random noun from our list of nouns, like Pineapple Ham.

So - remember when I said all text needs to be surrounded with quotes? Well, that's true! But what happens if we need to get the value of a variable? Let's look at the following example:

my_variable = "really cool thing"

puts my_variable
puts "my_variable"

If we run this code, it'll give us the following output:

really cool thing
my_variable

That's because when we surround anything with quotes, Ruby will treat it as a literal value, instead of getting the variable value. So, when we want to include a variable inside of quotes, we can use the funky #{my_variable} syntax. This is helpful when we need to put extra words around our variable.

So this -

my_variable = "really cool thing"

puts "I think that ice water is a #{my_variable}"

Outputs this!

I think that ice water is a really cool thing

The same thing is true for our sentence variable. We're just adding extra symbols and punctuation so our post is formatted well. So this -

sentence = "#{alignments.sample}: #{adjectives.sample} #{nouns.sample}."  

Has the possible output of this -

Running and Automating

So, if we take the code from above, and run it with our magic command, it'll create one blog for us, and then quit.

ruby ./lib/tumblr_bot.rb

This isn't really useful for bots, which usually post once every few hours. In order to automate this, we need to create a few changes to our tumblr_bot.rb file. It should look like this.

require 'tumblr_client'

# this part is different!
def post_a_thing
    # Authenticate via OAuth
    client = Tumblr::Client.new({
      :consumer_key => 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx',
      :consumer_secret => 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx',
      :oauth_token => 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx',
      :oauth_token_secret => 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx'
    })

    alignments = ["Lawful Good", 
                    "Neutral Good", 
                    "Chaotic Good", 
                    "Lawful Neutral",
                    "True Neutral",
                    "Chaotic Neutral",
                    "Lawful Evil",
                    "Neutral Evil",
                    "Chaotic Evil" ]

    adjectives = ["Cool", "Gamer", "Doctor", "Pathetic"]
    nouns = ["Boy", "Pineapple Ham", "Child", "Gluestick", "Muffin"]

    sentence = "#{alignments.sample}: #{adjectives.sample} #{nouns.sample}."

    # Make the request
    client.text("doomybottest", title: sentence)
end

We've wrapped our program in something new. This is called a function, and it basically labels a section of code so we can reuse it a bunch of times in different places. The syntax for creating a new function is def function_name where function_name is the name that you want as a label. This can be anything, but it shouldn't have spaces or begin with a number. We mark the end of a function with the end keyword.

If we run our code, you'd notice that nothing happens. That's because in order to run a function, we need to call it! At the very end of our file (after the end line), add the following, and then re-run.

post_a_thing

Cool, we've successfully called our post_a_thing function just by putting the name at the end of our file. You should notice our bot posted something. Go ahead and delete the post_a_thing line from your tumblr_bot.rb that you just made.

Time to create a new file! Let's create a new file in our bin directory that we made earlier, and let's call it bot.rb. Open the file in your editor, and add the following lines.

require_relative '../lib/tumblr_bot.rb'

while (true)
    post_a_thing
    puts 'posted a thing'
    sleep 3600
end

Okay, there's a lot of new stuff here, so what does it do? Well first, we have this line -

require_relative '../lib/tumblr_bot.rb'

That includes the file we were working on beforehand, tumblr_bot.rb.

We also wrapped all of our code in a while loop. This makes it so our program doesn't exit after it posts one thing, it loops infinitely until we shut it down ourselves by exiting out of the terminal.

Inside of our while loop, we call the function we just made, post_a_thing. We also use puts to tell us that we posted something successfully. Finally, we call sleep 3600 to delay the time until our bot makes a new post. the sleep function takes in a number of seconds to wait - in this case, we wait an hour, as 60 minutes * 60 seconds = 3600.

Finally, lets test our program -

ruby ./bin/bot.rb

With any luck, we should get a response that we posted a thing. Cool. And if we leave it running, it'll generate a new post every hour!

Download the Whole Project

Conclusion

If you liked this tutorial, let me know by sharing this post, or adding a comment below. Let me know if I should make more bot-oriented tutorials, too.

PART 2

End Goal

We're going to create a Tumblr bot that answers people's asks, similar to the infamous doomybot. We're also going to respond contextually depending on the user's ask (although it will be done crudely).

Note to Windows Users

Since August 2nd, 2016, Microsoft has released the Windows 10 anniversary edition. As you might know, I don't provide per-tutorial support to Windows users. However, in this new update, Microsoft released the Linux subsystem for Windows, which is a fancy way of saying you can use all of the commands I use in Linux on your Windows PC with no extra software. At this point, I'm still fond of Cygwin or running *nix on a VM, but you might like Microsoft's solution better. To enable this feature, search "Turn Windows Features on and off". Scroll down and check "Windows Subsystem for Linux" (If you can't find this option, you're not on the most recent version of Windows 10). You'll need to restart your computer after this for the changes to take effect. Once restarted, if you search "bash" from the start menu, you should get a bash terminal (basically the same terminal I use for these tutorials).

Getting Started

Let's open our tumblr_bot.rb file. It should look something like this:

require 'tumblr_client'
def post_a_thing

    # Authenticate via OAuth
    client = Tumblr::Client.new({
    :consumer_key => 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx',
    :consumer_secret => 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx',
    :oauth_token => 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx',
    :oauth_token_secret => 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx'
    })

    alignments = ["Lawful Good", 
                    "Neutral Good", 
                    "Chaotic Good", 
                    "Lawful Neutral",
                    "True Neutral",
                    "Chaotic Neutral",
                    "Lawful Evil",
                    "Neutral Evil",
                    "Chaotic Evil" ]

    adjectives = ["Cool", "Gamer", "Doctor", "Pathetic"]
    nouns = ["Boy", "Pineapple Ham", "Child", "Gluestick", "Muffin"]

    sentence = "#{alignments.sample}: #{adjectives.sample} #{nouns.sample}."

    # Make the request
    client.text("your_blog", title: sentence)
end

As a refresher, our interaction with Tumblr happens at the penultimate line: client.text("your_blog", title: sentence). We call the text function on our Tumblr client object, and create a text post.

Let's go ahead and delete some lines that we don't need right now. (You can make a copy of the project if you want to save your old bot). All we want to keep for now is the client creation.

require 'tumblr_client'
def post_a_thing

    # Authenticate via OAuth
    client = Tumblr::Client.new({
    :consumer_key => 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx',
    :consumer_secret => 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx',
    :oauth_token => 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx',
    :oauth_token_secret => 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx'
    })
    
end

Great job, you just deleted hours of work.

Secure your Stuff

If you're using Windows, don't worry about this part - but still read through it as code snippets in the future will reference this.

Anyways, right now we have this code:

client = Tumblr::Client.new({
    :consumer_key => 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx',
    :consumer_secret => 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx',
    :oauth_token => 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx',
    :oauth_token_secret => 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx'
    })

Yours doesn't look like this, exactly. You have a bunch of random looking characters where the X's are currently. The thing is, those random characters contain extremely sensitive information. If someone gained access to those strings, they could take over your Tumblr account. You might be thinking, "Well, I just won't share this code with anyone!", and that's a valid thought. However, it's best practice to store your super-secret password stuff in other places so you don't accidentally happen to upload it to a very public website.

We can do this by using environment variables. If you're using linux, open up the file located at ~/.bashrc. If you're on a Mac, the process seems to be slightly different. I don't have a Mac I can test with, but I believe the equivalent file is ~/.bash_profile.

If you have a different shell installed like ZSH, your file will be located at .zshrc - but if you went out of your way to install a different shell, you probably know how to set variables already.

Lets open the file, and scroll down to the bottom if there's already stuff written. We're going to add the following four lines:

export CONSUMER_KEY=""
export CONSUMER_SECRET=""
export OAUTH_TOKEN=""
export OAUTH_TOKEN_SECRET=""

You might notice that these four variables are the same as the ones defined within our Tumblr client in our tumblr_bot.rb file. There is a correlation! The variable names are the same, except they're all uppercase in our ~/.bashrc (as is the convention). Let's copy and paste the keys within the ' characters from our tumblr_bot.rb file between the " characters in our ~/.bashrc file.

Example:

If your tumblr_bot.rb file looks like this...

:consumer_key => 'aaabbbccc',
:consumer_secret => 'gghhjj',
:oauth_token => 'wweerr',
:oauth_token_secret => 'uuiioo'

... the end of your ~/.bashrc file should look like this:

export CONSUMER_KEY="aaabbbccc"
export CONSUMER_SECRET="gghhjj"
export OAUTH_TOKEN="wweerr"
export OAUTH_TOKEN_SECRET="uuiioo"

Great! We've stored our environment variables. We need to reload our shell for the changes to take effect. You can do this by shutting down your terminal and opening a new one, or by typing source ~/.bashrc.

We need to make one last change to our tumblr_bot.rb file in order for it to use the environment variables we just set. We'll use a built-in Ruby feature that fetches environment variables with the following -

client = Tumblr::Client.new({
    :consumer_key => ENV['CONSUMER_KEY'],
    :consumer_secret => ENV['CONSUMER_SECRET'],
    :oauth_token => ENV['OAUTH_TOKEN'],
    :oauth_token_secret => ENV['OAUTH_TOKEN_SECRET']
})

That's it! Now we can share our whole project folder with others. Note that I'll be using the ENV[] syntax in examples below, so don't get confused if you didn't do this step, and my stuff looks different than yours.

Modifying our Timing

Anyways, lets open up our bot.rb file in the bin folder. It should look like this:

require_relative '../lib/tumblr_bot.rb'

while (true)
    post_a_thing
    puts 'posted a thing'
    sleep 3600
end

Right now, we're posting a thing every 3600 seconds, which translates to 1 hour. We're going to change this number down to about 60 seconds.

So, why the change?

In the previous version of our bot, it posted completely on its own, without any influence from the outside world. However, in our new version, we're responding to asks. Since Tumblr doesn't provide webhooks when someone sends an ask, we need to constantly check our inbox to see if we got any new messages. Think of it like checking your email every minute.

Okay, so why 60?

60 seconds is admittedly an arbitrary number. 61 will work just as much as 32. However, I recommend not using super-small numbers like 10 seconds. This is because Tumblr would have to deal with your request every 10 seconds, which is probably against their terms of service. Be respectful to the service you're using!

Anyways, our line should now read

sleep 60

Checking for asks

Okay, remember when I said to be respectful to the service you're using? Well I'm going to be hypocritcal here and say that Tumblr's system for responding to asks via the API is plain stupid. The feature isn't documented anywhere, and I had to reverse-engineer the official app to figure out what endpoints were being called.

With that being said, I've made a little diagram of how our code flow is going to look.

We're getting all submissions. This includes your entire inbox - submission posts and asks alike. Although everything is mixed in together, we can check to make sure the submission is an ask before proceeding. Weirdly enough, when you post an ask with Tumblr, you're editing the already-created post. We need to edit the ask with the body text, along with changing the ask's state to "published". This will take the ask out of our inbox and push it onto our blog.

Great, now that we have a basic understanding of what's going on, we can code it pretty easily.

Getting asks in our Inbox

This section isn't devoted on how to get fanmail, in case you were wondering. But we will figure out what code-stuff we need to put in to make our bot read its inbox.

Navigate back to our tumblr_bot.rb file, and position your cursor right before the final end. Add this line -

asks = client.submissions(USERNAME, limit: 3)

You'll notice that our first parameter is the all-uppercase USERNAME. This isn't a typo, and you shouldn't substitute your own blog name here. This is what's called a constant. Because we need to access the username of the blog we will post to often, its good to define it in one place so we can change one line of code as opposed to 20. At the top of our file, right after require 'tumblr_client', we're going to define this constant.

USERNAME = "doomybottest"       # or whatever your desired blog name is

You might also notice a new parameter, limit: 3. This little bit of code lets us get 3 asks per inbox check. That way we can respond to multiple messages in one go.

Let's also make one more temporary modification to our code by calling a puts on the asks variable, like so -

asks = client.submissions(USERNAME, limit: 3)
puts asks

Before we test our code, we need to make sure something is in our bot's askbox. For testing purposes, lets send our bot a few asks.

Let's test our code. Start a shell/command prompt in our project root folder, and type ruby bin/bot.rb.

If you get a dynamic constant assignment error, check that your USERNAME constant is defined outside of the post_a_thing function.

If all goes well, the code should run without error, and you should get a response that looks like this -

{"posts"=>[{"blog_name"=>"doomybottest", "id"=>148370090189, "post_url"=>"https://www.tumblr.com/blog/doomybottest/submissions?148370090189", "slug"=>"will-i-ever-find-love", "type"=>"answer", "date"=>"2016-08-02 23:09:09 GMT", "timestamp"=>1470179349, "state"=>"submission", "format"=>"html", "reblog_key"=>"eneADWgq", "tags"=>[], "short_url"=>"https://tmblr.co/ZrmIvi2ABY_ZD", "summary"=>"Will I ever find love?", "recommended_source"=>nil, "recommended_color"=>nil, "followed"=>true, "highlighted"=>[], "liked"=>false, "note_count"=>0, "asking_name"=>"doomy", "asking_url"=>"http://doomy.me/", "question"=>"Will I ever find love?", "answer"=>"", "reblog"=>{"tree_html"=>"", "comment"=>""}, "trail"=>[], "can_send_in_message"=>false, "can_reply"=>true}, 

Yikes - that's a lot of... stuff. What we're looking at is called a hash, and it contains all of the information a single ask possesses. Although it's a little difficult to explain without understanding serialization, all we need to know is that all of our asks are stored in an array called posts.

So, let's modify our client.submissions line to get all posts.

asks = client.submissions(USERNAME, limit: 3)['posts']

Now that we have an array of asks, we need to loop over each one (since we're getting 3 at a time).

Let's remove our puts asks line, and write this in it's place:

asks.each do |ask|
    # only answer asks (don't worry about submissions or fanmail)
    if ask['type'] != 'answer'
        return
    end

    # temporarily print out our question
    puts ask['question']
end   

In completion, our code should currently look like this:

require 'tumblr_client'
USERNAME = "doomybottest"

def post_a_thing

    # Authenticate via OAuth
    client = Tumblr::Client.new({
    :consumer_key => ENV['CONSUMER_KEY'],
    :consumer_secret => ENV['CONSUMER_SECRET'],
    :oauth_token => ENV['OAUTH_TOKEN'],
    :oauth_token_secret => ENV['OAUTH_TOKEN_SECRET']
    })

    asks = client.submissions(USERNAME, limit: 3)['posts']

    asks.each do |ask|
        # only answer asks (don't worry about submissions or fanmail)
        if ask['type'] != 'answer'
            return
        end

        # temporarily print out our question
        puts ask['question']
    end   

end

Let's go ahead and run our code again with ruby bin/bot.rb. If all goes according to plan, we should get the text of the question we sent!

ruby bin/bot.rb
>> Will I ever find love?

Great, we completed step one on our chart.

Steps 2, 3 and 4.

We can read asks that we got, but we can't really do anything with them. Let's implement that now. Let's replace the puts ask['question'] line with the following code:

response = "wow neato"
tags = "cool, stuff, vaporsoft"

client.edit(USERNAME,
    id: ask['id'],
    answer: response,
    state: 'published',
    tags: tags)

By calling client.edit, we do a few things to our ask. We set its response to the variable response (creative!), set its tags to a variable called tags, and its state to published. Let's go ahead and run our code with ruby bin/bot.rb.

After our code tells us it posted a thing, let's check our blog. We should see our ask published!

This is great and all, but answering "wow neato" to every ask isn't all that exciting, unless we have the url "passiveagressivebot" (which is up for grabs at the time of writing this, in case you were wondering).

Let's make our bot a little more contextual by greeting our askee by username, and then scrambling the question. We can do this by editing our response variable.

response = "Hi #{ask['asking_name']}, #{ask['question'].split(' ').shuffle.join(' ')}"

Lets deconstruct this very ruby statement -

ask['asking_name'] - gets us the blog name of the askee

ask['question'].split(' ').shuffle.join(' ') - gets us the question asked, and then mixes all the words around

Cool. Try running your bot with ruby bin/bot.rb after sending your bot an ask.

And... it works! Fantastic. If you're having trouble, here's the code in full.

require 'tumblr_client'
USERNAME = "doomybottest"

def post_a_thing

    # Authenticate via OAuth
    client = Tumblr::Client.new({
    :consumer_key => ENV['CONSUMER_KEY'],
    :consumer_secret => ENV['CONSUMER_SECRET'],
    :oauth_token => ENV['OAUTH_TOKEN'],
    :oauth_token_secret => ENV['OAUTH_TOKEN_SECRET']
    })

    asks = client.submissions(USERNAME, limit: 3)['posts']

    asks.each do |ask|
        # only answer asks (don't worry about submissions or fanmail)
        if ask['type'] != 'answer'
            return
        end

        response = "Hi #{ask['asking_name']}, #{ask['question'].split(' ').shuffle.join(' ')}"
        tags = "cool, stuff, vaporsoft"

        client.edit(USERNAME,
                    id: ask['id'],
                    answer: response,
                    state: 'published',
                    tags: tags)

    end   

end

Modifying for our own uses

We have a great base project for building more complicated bots. All we need to do is modify the response and tags variables for totally different responses. Ruby is really good at manipulating strings of text, so go out and explore!

Download the Whole Project

Conclusion

If you liked this tutorial, let me know by sharing this post, or adding a comment below. Let me know if I should make more bot-oriented tutorials, too. If you're feeling awfully nice, you can donate to me.