Forem: Geoffrey Bourne

Twitter API: How to Post and Get Analytics With the Twitter API

Geoffrey Bourne — Sat, 24 Dec 2022 19:00:34 +0000

In this tutorial, discover how the Twitter API can enhance your business, and learn how to post and get analytics directly from your platform or app on behalf of your users.

Despite its recent upheaval, Twitter remains one of the most visible social media platforms with about 238 million daily active users worldwide. Some of the biggest businesses, brands, and celebrities engage in public conversations with customers and followers every day on Twitter.

Much of this engagement is done manually using Twitter’s apps, either Twitter built apps or 3rd parties apps. But Twitter also has a robust API (Application Programming interface), which opens up a world of possibilities, e.g. Tweet on behalf of your user right from your platform, present rich analytics such as follower growth, or notify your users when someone comments on their posts.

Here is a quick guide on how to integrate the Twitter API, send a post, and get the analytics.

Why Twitter Is Important for Your Business

Businesses are able to engage with customers by using Twitter’s functionality, including promoted tweets, retweets, ads, Twitter Spaces, curation lists, direct messages, website embeds, and annotations. According to Twitter, over 68% of its users purchase from a business they follow. Other studies show that customers prefer to message rather than call customer support, and those who get good support on Twitter are likely to spend more on the brand.

Twitter’s user demographics are also compelling. The number of monetizable users in the U.S. has steadily increased every year to 41.5 million in 2022. Given all this, is there a way businesses can utilize Twitter better? That’s where APIs come in.

Introduction To Twitter APIs

The Twitter REST API enable web and mobile applications to use Twitter data and features for their unique business needs and customer experiences.

Here are a few interesting business use cases for a Twitter API:

A hiring platform (like Indeed) can post new jobs from a client on that client’s Twitter account.
A home real estate platform (like Zillow) can publish videos of new rentals on the landlord’s Twitter account and their ads using the ads API.
Whenever a shopping season hashtag like “#blackfridaysale” is trending, an e-commerce platform like Shopify can automatically detect it in real-time and tweet the latest products in its inventory.
A customer service platform like Intercom can automatically search tweets using the search endpoint, and open tickets for a customer who receives user complaints on Twitter.

If you’re a developer, we’ll walk you through a step-by-step tutorial to start using the Twitter APIs.

Prepare To Use The Twitter API

First, you have to figure out what your app needs, and then configure its details in Twitter’s developer portal.

1. Select the Features and API Versions You Need

Twitter APIs have multiple versions like Twitter API v2, Standard v1.1, and Enterprise APIs (or Gnip). Use the API resources page to figure out the list of the versions you’ll need.

Top Twitter API tip: Use Twitter API v2, which is based on GraphQL, for all calls except posting images and videos. Currently only v1.1 supports posting media such as images and videos.

2. API Access Level and Approval

Next, decide the API access level you need from Twitter’s access levels page. Each level unlocks more features and higher rate limits. You get essential access by default without needing any approval. But approval is required for elevated and academic research access. In general, essential access is sufficient to start, and you can apply for elevated access when needed. Note that approval can take up to two weeks or more.

3. Register With the Developer Portal

4. Configure Settings for Your App

On logging in, you’ll see your main app under “Projects & Apps.” Select the app and click “Set up” under “User authentication settings.” Configure your app as follows:

App permissions: Read and write.
Type of App: If your app can send secrets like the client secret securely, select “Confidential client.” If not, select “Public client.” Typically, traditional client-server web apps are confidential while mobile apps without any servers are public clients.
Callback URI: Register the endpoints of your app that Twitter can call during user authorization.
Website URL: A link to your web application or its information page.

5. Store the Client ID and Secret for Your App

After configuration, you’ll get a client ID and client secret for your app. Store them securely in a database, vault, or similar. Either design your application to read them securely, or set up your server to read and inject them into your application’s environment.

6. Decide on Direct Calls or a Client SDK Package

You can either make all the Twitter REST API calls directly or use one of the many Twitter Client SDK packages. Our favorite for Node.js is twitter-api-v2 since it supports most features (v1.1 and v2) and is maintained. We also recommend testing the API calls in Postman…it makes life a lot easier.

For the rest of this article, we’ll stick with direct REST API calls.

Get Consent From Your Users to Tweet on Their Behalf

To tweet or get analytics on behalf of your users, you must first get their consent. This step is called authorization and is implemented using the OAuth 2.0 authorization code flow. Its outcome is an access token per user that enables your application to call Twitter’s APIs.

1. Provide a Link or Button to Let Your Users Authorize

By clicking it, your users can initiate the authorization flow. Call your app’s /authorize endpoint when it’s clicked.

2. Generate the Authorization URL

In your /authorize endpoint, create an authorization URL and redirect your user there. It’ll open an authorization page owned by Twitter.

Authorization URL format:

https://twitter.com/i/oauth2/authorize?response_type=code&scope=tweet.read%20tweet.write%20users.read%20offline.access&client_id={client-id}&redirect_uri={registered-url}&state={state}&code_challenge={challenge}&code_challenge_method=S256

The important parameters here are:

redirect_uri={registered-url}: An endpoint of your web or native app that’s also registered in the developer portal. Twitter sends the authorization code here.
client_id={client-id}: Your app’s client ID from the developer portal.
scope: The permissions your app needs. Though you just want permission to post, the posting endpoint itself requires the first three.

Generate the other values using this boilerplate:

const state = randomstring.generate(48);
const codeVerifier = randomstring.generate(128);
const base64Digest = crypto.createHash("sha256").update(codeVerifier).digest("base64");
const codeChallenge = base64url.fromBase64(base64Digest);

3. Receive the Authorization Code

Once a user has authorized your app, Twitter sends the authorization code for that user to your app’s redirect_uri endpoint:

GET https://REDIRECT-URL?code={auth-code}&state={state}

4. Exchange the Code for an Access Token

Use that authorization code to obtain an access token from the API v2 endpoint, 2/oauth2/token:

POST https://api.twitter.com/2/oauth2/token

The parameters are:

grant_type=authorization_code
code={auth-code}: The authorization code you received.
redirect_uri={registered-url}: Same redirect URL sent earlier.
code_verifier={verifier}: The codeVerifier calculated earlier.
Header Authorization: Basic {client-credentials}
Header Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded;charset=UTF-8

Get the {client-credentials}by combining the client ID and secret:

const clientCreds = ${clientId}:${clientSecret};
const clientCreds = Buffer.from(clientCreds).toString('base64');

The response JSON:

{
  "access_token": "…",
  "refresh_token": "…",
  "token_type": "bearer",
  "expires_in": 7200,
  "scope": "tweet.read tweet.write users.read offline.access"
}

This access token expires in two hours. But using the refresh token, you can request new access tokens from the same endpoint.

You should treat refresh tokens like passwords. Encrypt and store them securely in your database or vault.

Post a Tweet With the Twitter API V2

It’s taken us many steps just to get that access token of your user. Luckily, things get easier now.
Post your first request as your user with these parameters and headers:

POST https://api.twitter.com/2/tweets

text={tweet}: The text of your tweet (required)
Header Authorization: Bearer {access_token}
Header Content-Type: application/json

If the request succeeds, you receive a 200 (success) with this JSON:

{
  "data": {
  "id": "1591766215437361152",
  "text": "The text of your tweet"
  }
}

The ID returned is the Tweet ID and can be used to directly link to the Tweet:

https://twitter.com/{user}/status/{ID}

But if something’s wrong or missing in the app settings or request headers, it responds with a 403 (forbidden) status:

{
  "title": "Forbidden",
  "type": "about:blank",
  "status": 403,
  "detail": "Forbidden"
}

A tweet request using Node.js with JavaScript looks like this:

import fetch from 'node-fetch';

// Get the access token for the current user.
// from your database / vault / keyring, etc.

const accessTokenOfUser = getAccessTokenOfLoggedInUser();
const params = {
'text': 'Your tweet'
};

const apiResp = await fetch('https://api.twitter.com/2/tweets', {
  method: 'POST',
  headers: {
    'Authorization': Bearer ${accessTokenOfUser},
    'Content-Type': 'application/json'
  },
  body: JSON.stringify(params)
});

const tweet = await apiResp.json();

Get Analytics With the Twitter API v2

Get metrics for a tweet from the tweets lookup endpoint by specifying the information you want in tweet.fields:

GET https://api.twitter.com/2/tweets/{ID}?tweet.fields=public_metrics,organic_metrics,non_public_metrics

{ID}: A tweet ID
tweet.fields: One or more of public_metrics, organic_metrics, non_public_metrics, and promoted_metrics. The metrics doc explains them. Use commas to separate multiple values.
Header Authorization: Bearer {access_token}

An example JSON response:

{
  "data": {
    "id": "1591766215437361152",
    "public_metrics": {
      "retweet_count": 0,
      "reply_count": 0,
      "like_count": 0,
      "quote_count": 0
  },
  "non_public_metrics": {
    "impression_count": 4,
    "user_profile_clicks": 0
  },
  "organic_metrics": {
    "retweet_count": 0,
    "impression_count": 4,
    "reply_count": 0,
    "like_count": 0,
    "user_profile_clicks": 0
  },
  "text": "The text of your tweet",
  …
  }
}

Using Node.js with JavaScript:

import fetch from 'node-fetch';

const accessTokenOfUser = getAccessTokenOfLoggedInUser();

const tweetId = 'A-TWEET-ID';

const tweetUrl = https://api.twitter.com/2/tweets/${tweetId} +
  '?tweet.fields=public_metrics,organic_metrics,non_public_metrics';

const apiResp = await fetch(tweetUrl, {
  headers: {
    'Authorization' : Bearer ${accessTokenOfUser}}
  });

const metrics = await apiResp.json();

An Easier Alternative to the Twitter API

Congratulations if you got through the long list of steps needed to use Twitter’s API. You can drastically cut down on this by using Ayrshare’s social media API as an alternative to the Twitter API.

Posting a tweet using our API’s Twitter integration and Social API NPM package is as easy as this:

// Install Ayrshare’s Node package: npm i social-post-api
import SocialPost from 'social-post-api';

// 1. Get your API key from https://app.ayrshare.com/api.
// 2. Add it to your application’s environment.
// export AYRSHARE_API_KEY=YOUR-AYRSHARE-API-KEY

const social = new SocialPost(process.env.AYRSHARE_API_KEY);
const post = social.post({
  "post": "Your tweet",
  "platforms": ["twitter"]
})
.then((json) => console.log(json))
.catch(console.error);

The prerequisites are also simple. Just sign up for Ayrshare, get your API key, link to your users’ Twitter accounts, and start calling. You don’t have to struggle with OAuth, app settings, credential security, approval, or Twitter’s docs.

Try out more examples with Ayrshare’s APIs or see our other integrations such as Python, Airtable, and Bubble.

1. Tweet With Ayrshare, Node, and Fetch

You don’t have to use our NPM package or other integrations. Calling our API using your preferred HTTP package is just as simple! Here’s an example using the node-fetch package:

const params = {
  'post': 'Your tweet',
  'platforms': ['twitter']
}

const apiResp = await fetch('https://app.ayrshare.com/api/post', {
  method: 'POST',
  headers: {
    'Authorization' : Bearer ${process.env.AYRSHARE_API_KEY},
    'Content-Type': 'application/json'
  },
  body: JSON.stringify(params)
});

const tweet = await apiResp.json();

2. Post a Twitter Thread With Ayrshare, Python, and Requests

Posting a numbered thread of tweets requires just two additional options. Ayrshare automatically breaks up your lengthy message into a numbered sequence of tweets. Compare this to the Twitter API where you have to post each tweet with details of its previous tweet.

import os
import requests

params = {
  'post': 'Your lengthy essay…',
  'platforms': ['twitter'],
  'twitterOptions': {
    'thread': True,
    'threadNumber': True
  }
}

headers = {
  'Authorization': f'Bearer {os.environ["AYRSHARE_API_KEY"]}',
  'Content-Type': 'application/json'
}

r = requests.post('https://app.ayrshare.com/api/post', 
  json=params, headers=headers)

tweet = r.json()

3. Tweet an Image or Video Using Ayrshare’s Python Package

For images and videos in your user’s tweets, Twitter API expects you to upload them to its /media/upload endpoint, keep track of their details, and pass them to the tweets endpoint.

Using Ayrshare, just set the mediaUrls option to a list of links.

Remember that you need a premium, business, or enterprise plan to tweet videos or more than one image.

If you don’t have a server for your media, you can upload them to our /media API endpoint.

import os

# python -m pip install -U social-post-api
from ayrshare import SocialPost

params = {
  'post': 'Your tweet',
  'platforms': ['twitter'],
  'mediaUrls': ['https://IMAGE–LINK1', 'https://IMAGE-LINK2']
}

social = SocialPost(os.environ["AYRSHARE_API_KEY"])

result = social.post(params)

Get Analytics for Your Social Posts

How can your users know if their posts and engagements are doing well? You can get detailed metrics for their posts and present the data:

POST https://app.ayrshare.com/api/analytics/post

See the analytics API reference for the full response.

Boost Your Users’ Online Presence With Twitter API Posting

As a powerful social media platform, Twitter can benefit your customers and drive business. Moreover, by learning the basics of both Twitter and Ayrshare APIs, you can further improve engagement.

About the Author

Geoffrey Bourne is co-founder of Jamdesk - the best software documentation platform.

TikTok API: How to Post to TikTok Using a Social Media API

Geoffrey Bourne — Mon, 17 Jan 2022 22:43:59 +0000

You are probably familiar with the official TikTok app to create and share videos. But, did you know you can also directly post videos using the TikTok API?

Using a social media API opens worlds of possibilities to create your own app, platform, or service for your users, such as scheduling TikTok posts directly from your platform.

Ayrshare recently introduced direct TikTok video sharing and enhanced user profile data and analytics. Continue reading to learn about how to use the TikTok API for your own platform.

TikTok’s Growth

If you haven’t heard, TikTok is big! TikTok has over 3.3B installs worldwide, 1B monthly active users, and in Q4 2021 had the most installs ever in a single quarter. Their growth seems unstoppable and continues to accelerate during the pandemic lockdowns.

TikTok also has a thriving ecosystem of apps that support video creation and downloads. Major new companies that build upon TikTok will emerge – as has happened for Facebook and Instagram. And how did developers create these Facebook and Instagram 3rd party apps? By using an API.

Social Media APIs

An API, or Application Programming Interface, gives you, or your developers, the power to create your own app or platform and leverage the capabilities of 3rd parties. You build the experience (GUI) that exactly meets your business needs and on the backend harness the power of external datasets or functionality.

For example, the popular weather app Dark Skies, now owned by Apple, has a unique interface and capabilities such as letting you know it will rain in 15 minutes. Dark Skies and all other weather apps need to get this weather data from somewhere and I guarantee they don’t have their own network of weather satellites. In the U.S. most weather apps get their data from the National Weather Service via their API and build their own GUI front-end and unique capabilities.

Social media schedulers do the same thing by using the social media APIs available from social networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter.

Share Videos Using the TikTok API

TikTok recently introduced the ability to directly share videos via their API – called the Video Kit. Previously you could only share via an iOS or Android app, but now you can post directly to their endpoint. Side note, there is also a TikTok Marketing API if you want to manage ads.

The TikTok social media endpoint uses typical OAuth with tokens. OAuth allows users to authenticate and grant permissions to your all. These grant tokens expire after 24 hours, but can be refreshed with an additional API call. However, after a year the user need to re-authenticate and give permissions again.

TikTok requires you to request approval and go through a review process for API access, which can take a few days to a few weeks. Since their API endpoint is so new, there are several missing features, such deleting posts, and bugs that might prevent quick development.

Finally, there are a few other interesting aspects of the TikTok API documentation you might want to explore, such as the Sound Kit for sharing sounds or Webhooks to get notified of actions.

Alternative Integration

An alternative option to directly integrating with the TikTok API is to integrate with Ayrshare’s social media API which includes TikTok integration. You no longer need approval or worry about the details of TikTok’s evolving API.

For example, to post a new TikTok video use the following Javascript code with the /post endpoint. Be sure to replace API_KEY with your key from the dashboard:

var myHeaders = new Headers();
myHeaders.append("Authorization", "Bearer API_KEY");

var raw = JSON.stringify({
  "post": "Today is a great day!",
  "platforms": [
    "tiktok"
  ],
  "mediaUrls": [
    "https://images.ayrshare.com/imgs/test-video.mp4"
  ]
});

var requestOptions = {
  method: 'POST',
  headers: myHeaders,
  body: raw,
  redirect: 'follow'
};

fetch("https://app.ayrshare.com/api/post", requestOptions)
  .then(response => response.text())
  .then(result => console.log(result))
  .catch(error => console.log('error', error));

Here is a TikTok Example

Or if you prefer to call the Ayrshare TikTok API in Python:

import requests
import json

url = "https://app.ayrshare.com/api/post"

payload = json.dumps({
  "post": "Today is a great day!",
  "platforms": [
    "tiktok"
  ],
  "mediaUrls": [
    "https://images.ayrshare.com/imgs/test-video.mp4"
  ]
})
headers = {
  'Authorization': 'Bearer API_KEY'
}

response = requests.request("POST", url, headers=headers, data=payload)

print(response.text)

After posting, go to your TikTok app to complete the posting by selecting the video and following the instructions.

Enhanced TikTok User and Post Analytics
In addition to posting videos to TikTok, you also might want analytics information about the user or individual post, such as how many views, shares, or likes.

For example, to get the user level analytics across all their TikTok videos call the /analytics endpoint. Here is the code in Javascript:

var myHeaders = new Headers();
myHeaders.append("Authorization", "Bearer API_KEY");

var urlencoded = new URLSearchParams();
urlencoded.append("platforms[0]", "tiktok");

var requestOptions = {
  method: 'POST',
  headers: myHeaders,
  body: urlencoded,
  redirect: 'follow'
};

fetch("https://app.ayrshare.com/api/analytics/social", requestOptions)
  .then(response => response.text())
  .then(result => console.log(result))
  .catch(error => console.log('error', error));

And the Python TikTok API code:

import requests

url = "https://app.ayrshare.com/api/analytics/social"

payload='platforms%5B0%5D=tiktok'
headers = {
  'Authorization': 'Bearer API_KEY'
}

response = requests.request("POST", url, headers=headers, data=payload)

print(response.text)

The user level analytics data returned includes the average video duration and total like, comments, share, and views.

{
   "tiktok": {
        "analytics": {
            "durationAverage": 4.8,
            "likeCountTotal": 4,
            "commentCountTotal": 6,
            "shareCountTotal": 34,
            "viewCountTotal": 193
        }
}

If you want to get all past video posts and analytics on each, call the /history endpoint. The post level analytics data returned includes the share link of the video, description, and counts of likes, comments, shares, and views. this feature is unique to Ayrshare.

{
    "createTime": 1641604664,
    "shareUrl": "https://www.tiktok.com/@funtime/video/705063834032649?utm_campaign=tt4d_open_api&utm_source=wawnhyitaos7o7",
    "videoDescription": "Blah",
    "duration": 4,
    "id": "7050638340353264943",
    "title": "Blah",
    "embedLink": "https://www.tiktok.com/embed/v2/7050638340353264943",
    "likeCount": 0,
    "commentCount": 0,
    "shareCount": 0,
    "viewCount": 0
},
{
    "createTime": 1641603132,
    "shareUrl": "https://www.tiktok.com/@funtime/video/7050631761763536?utm_campaign=tt4d_open_api&utm_source=wawnhyictaos7o7",
    "videoDescription": "Yes",
    "duration": 4,
    "id": "705063176176353",
    "title": "Yes",
    "embedLink": "https://www.tiktok.com/embed/v2/705063176176353",
    "likeCount": 0,
    "commentCount": 0,
    "shareCount": 0,
    "viewCount": 0
}

This insights data can be integrated into your app or platform for your users.

About the Author

Geoffrey Bourne is co-founder of Jamdesk - the best software documentation platform.

Best Social Media Posting and Scheduling APIs of 2021

Geoffrey Bourne — Mon, 16 Aug 2021 23:02:51 +0000

Last year we published one of our most popular articles on the best social media APIs for posting and scheduling. It got a lot of attention from platforms, CMS, agencies, and companies that want to programmatically post on behalf themselves or their users. For 2021, we’re updating the the list and giving more in-depth analysis so you can find the right solutions for your business.

Why Use a Social Media API?

===========================

If you want to manually post and schedule social media to networks like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, or YouTube, there are some excellent web-based posting tools out there. However, if you run an app or platform, say for example a CMS that allows user to create content, your users typically want a simple process to post to social media networks without having to download the content and do it manually. This sharing can be part of a workflow or an automatic process, but the point is you want to make sharing simple and easy for your users without them leaving your platform.

A social media API makes it possible to programmatically publish from your backend system, allowing you to control the content, posting schedule, management, and reposting on behalf of your users.

There are two ways to integrate with the networks:

Direct API connection with each social network. This often requires an approval process at each network and continuous maintenance, but the networks do not charge for standard access.
3rd party social media API. While integration is easier and they handle maintenance, there typically is a monthly charge.

Here are some 3rd party social media scheduling tools that offer API access in alphabetical order.

List of the Top Social Media APIs

1. Ayrshare

Tagline: Powerful APIs that enable you to send social media posts effortlessly. For developers and businesses of all sizes.

API Documentation: link

Pricing: Free to $14.99/mo for Unlimited Premium. Free plan offers 8 social accounts and 30 posts a month. Business Plans for multiple users as low as $1.85/mo.

The Good: In our humble opinion, Ayrshare is the best choice around if you’re looking for a social media API…I mean it is our product and all. We’re the only API-first social media scheduling tool, so everything we build is about working seamlessly with your backend system. That is why we offer numerous SDK packages and coding examples.

The Bad: The manual posting dashboard is basic. If you’re looking to spend your day manually posting in a desktop GUI, there are better choices than Ayrshare. In fact, we wrote and article Why You Shouldn’t Use Ayrshare.

2. Buffer

Tagline: Tell your brand’s story and grow your audience with a publishing, analytics, and engagement platform you can trust.

API Documentation: link — no new developer accounts since 2019

Pricing: $15 to $99 a month. Free plan offers 5 social accounts and 10 posts a month.

The Good: We love Buffer! It was the first tool we used before developing Ayrshare. Buffer’s dashboard is perfectly simple and really a model for all other apps. The API is clear and has all the features needed to schedule posts, with some cool features such as reorder and shuffle future posts.

The Bad: Simple — Buffer shut down new developer access. Unless you already have a developer account, you’re out of luck.

3. Hootsuite

Tagline: Easily manage all your social media and get results with Hootsuite.

API Documentation: link

Pricing: $49 to $599 a month. The Free plan recently was changed to 2 social profiles and 5 posts a month.

The Good: Hootsuite is one of the most popular scheduling tools. They have a great reputation, feature set, and have been around a long time. Their API is well documented and straight-forward. And if you’re looking to manually post, they have one of the best GUIs around.

The Bad: Hootsuite’s API has not been updated in over 2 years and they are lacking many newer integrations, such as Instagram. Also, Hootsuite just raised prices for a lot of their users.

4. HubSpot

Tagline: Marketing, sales, and service software that helps your business grow without compromise. Because “good for the business” should also mean “good for the customer.”

API Documentation: link

Pricing: $50 to $3,200 a month

The Good: HubSpot is a great platform for marketing and they also have an API integration for social posting.

The Bad: Unfortunately, it looks like HubSpot deprecated their API. We found the API to be a bit confusing without a clear way to choose a network, such as Twitter or Instagram, to publish the post.

5. SocialOomph

Tagline: Boost your productivity with advanced post scheduling tools.

API Documentation: link

Pricing: $20 to $83 a month

The Good: SocialOomph take a unique approach where each user sets up their open webhook and provides that to the platform. The platform then calls the webhook to post to that user’s account.

The Bad: The use of webhooks is very technical and might be a lot fo the average customer/user to understand and setup.

6. Social Flow

Tagline: We help publishers extract more revenue from their best content on social platforms.

API Documentation: Not publicly available

The Good: SocialFlow is focused on publishing and advertising for the media industry. It is used by many publishers such as The New York Times, National Geographical Channel, and Fast Company.

The Bad: Because SocialFlow keeps a tight lipped on pricing and their API, you’ll need to contact them directly.

About the Author

Geoffrey Bourne is co-founder of Jamdesk - the best software documentation platform.

The Power of Javascript Promise.all()

Geoffrey Bourne — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 15:42:35 +0000

This post is not about Promises, async/await, or the single-threaded nature of Javascript. If you want to know about these topics, go here, here, or here.

This article is about the function Promise.all() and how you bring your independently running functions or tasks together into a beautiful result.

As is often the case, an example or use case does wonders.

Use Case: Post to Multiple Social Media Networks

Our app Ayrshare’s primary purpose is to provide one API to post across multiple social media networks, such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

A user will make an API call (RESTful or via a client package) with the post text, image, and the list of networks to send the post. The API returns the resulting success or error for each network as an array of results.

However, there is complexity behind the scenes.

Each network has its own authorization, workflow, and security requirements. For example, if you attach an image to the post, Twitter requires you to first upload the image, wait for their processing to complete, and send the returned media ID in your a new update status call to Twitter. Timings vary, errors can occur for some and not for others, and new networks are added all the time. But from an end-user perspective, they sent the post and the results are returned right away.

Here is a visual (Firebase tech stack overview):

We want to run all the network posts in parallel and collect the results to return to the caller. As the number of networks increases, we ideally want to take no longer than the longest network.

The problem we face is if each network function call is asynchronous, then each function will complete at different times and we won’t be able to return the results in one response.

Promise.all() To The Rescue

If you have a similar problem, Promise.all() is your solution.

Promise.all() “takes an iterable of promises as an input, and returns a single Promise that resolves to an array of the results of the input promises.”

In other words, if you call several async functions, you can wait until they all resolve and capture their output in an array.

Let’s see a simple example:

const getSquare = async (x) => Math.pow(x, 2);
const printSquares = async () => {
     const nums = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5];
     const promiseArray = nums.map(x => getSquare(x));

     console.log(promiseArray);
};

printSquares();

printSquare iterates over an array of ints and squares each one. Calling getSquare returns a promise because we made it an asynchronous function by adding the keyword async – technically we don’t need async since the Math.pow function is synchronous.

The promiseArray is an array of promises, waiting to be resolved. When we print the promiseArray:

[
   Promise { 1 },
   Promise { 4 },
   Promise { 9 },
   Promise { 16 },
   Promise { 25 }
]

Close, but what is with those “Promises”? Well, as mentioned above, the array is composed of Promises waiting to be resolved. They can easily be resolved with Promise.all():

const getSquare = async (x) => Math.pow(x, 2);
const printSquares = async () => {
     const nums = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5];
     const promiseArray = nums.map(x => getSquare(x));

     const results = await Promise.all(promiseArray);
     console.log(results);
};

printSquares();

and the results:

[ 1, 4, 9, 16, 25 ]

Perfect! Also the results order is maintained.

Notice that we need to await on Promise.all() since itself returns a Promise that needs to be resolved.

For those that are curious, here is a real example of Ayrshare’s code that posts to all the networks:

/**
* Post to social networks
*/
const postNetworks = NETWORKS.map((net) => {
  return platforms.includes(net.type)
    ? net.func(auth[net.type], post, urls, id, {...})
    : [];
});

const processedSocial = await Promise.all(postNetworks);

Final Thoughts: Parallel Processing

Often Promise.all() is thought of as running in parallel, but this isn’t the case.

Parallel means that you do many things at the same time on multiple threads.

However, Javascript is single threaded with one call stack and one memory heap. It is an asynchronous, non-blocking language. This means Javascript doesn’t run in parallel, but rather runs only one function/Promise at a time. If the single thread has to wait on something, like the return from an http call, it will move on to another function until the return is complete.

In the case of our array of Promises, each Promise will be handled one at at time, but Javascript will switch between each one if the processing needs to wait. While the order of Promise resolution in Promise.all() can vary depending upon blocking, the final result will be an array of ordered results.

About the Author

Geoffrey Bourne is co-founder of Jamdesk - the best software documentation platform.

Our Firebase Tech Stack

Geoffrey Bourne — Tue, 08 Dec 2020 15:36:18 +0000

When we started Ayrshare we were keen on using an infrastructure as a service platform and avoid server setup, SSL certs, opening ports, etc. Time to market, right. Amongst the many platforms out there we choose Firebase. It was an easy decision for us since we are very comfortable with Firebase having built, and even sold, apps built upon it. If not Firebase our second choice would have been Netlify.

Today and Tomorrow Requirements

The first question we asked was, “What we need today?” If came down to a few criteria:

Authentication, ideally having SSO with the major networks
Hosting a static single page app (React)
Hosting a landing page. We generally don’t like to build the landing pages in React.
A database, preferably noSQL
Back-end running NodeJS, preferably serverless
Event tracking, e.g. Google Analytics
Email service
Payment service

Second, we asked, “What we might need tomorrow?”

iOS and Android apps
Mobile app push notifications
ML (machine learning)

Our Stack

We have built on many platform: AWS, Heroku, under our desk (not kidding), and Digital Ocean. We ended up choosing Firebase since it meets a lot of our needs, but certainly not all.

Firebase is a good choice for SPA React hosting and Firestore as a noSQL database. Google Analytics comes built into Firebase. Also, using Firebase’s authentication UI system allowed us to have a secure registration and login process integrated with major SSO providers like Google, Facebook, and GitHub.

The landing page we built in WordPress hosted on Siteground. There are so many great templates and plugins available for WordPress that we see no reason to recreate the wheel in React. Another option we considered was Gatsby hosted on separate Firebase project.

Sending emails requires a mail provider and we are accustomed to using Mailgun. Firebase has recently introduced Extensions, prebuilt cloud functions. One of our favorite is the Email Trigger extension that facilitates sending email from your cloud functions.

For a payment system, we choose Stripe. Stripe has a really nice NPM package that makes integration relatively easy.

Finally, we decided right before launch to add a link shortener, which is very useful when publishing to networks like Twitter that limit the characters. At first we were going to go with bit.ly, but it would soon become more expensive than what we were charging users. We ultimately went with Firebase’s Dynamic Links, Google’s replacement for goo.gl. Dynamic Links real power are with mobile apps, but it can also be used as a link shortener if you are willing use the RESTful API calls.

Firebase Cloud Functions & APIs

Ayrshare is build as an API first platform, so it is critical to have a robust API system. Building a Cloud Function for each API endpoint is not flexible or secure. However, you can add Express to Cloud Function and it is an excellent and battle tested framework to build and expose APIs.
For example, you can add several security and API facilitating packages such as:

const express = require("express");
const cors = require("cors");
const bodyParser = require("body-parser");
const helmet = require("helmet");
const rateLimit = require("express-rate-limit");

If you do add Express, you can add the “app” as an http function and export it.

const app = express();
exports.api = functions.https.onRequest(app);

And then add you typical express functions.

app.get("/fun", (req, res) => {
  console.log("hello fun");
  return res.send('"Hi fun");
});

Looking Towards the Future

In the future we plan on building mobile apps, especially for allowing Instagram posting, and will require push notifications. In previous projects we used Firebase’s Cloud Messaging (FCM) system and found it easy, reliable, and free!
And if we really look ahead, we want to add some ML analysis on ideal posting times. The current Firebase ML offering doesn’t seem a great fit, but perhaps it will be in the future.

Note on Rate Limit

We had an interesting discussion on Reddit regarding the use of express-rate-limit. See the code above for details.
We use express-rate-limit to manage API requests per IP so a user doesn’t make 1000 requests a minute. If you use the express-rate-limit default in-memory state storage, every time Cloud Functions re-initializes your code (and cold starts) and all modules are reloaded and the in-memory rate count starts from zero. For example, if you specify the rate limit to be 20 requests per hour and a user hits their limit, but a cold start occurs, the user could make another 20 calls within that hour.

The right way is to use an external storage for rate limit tracking. Luckly, there are packages that integrate with Redis, Memcache, and MongoDB.

About the Author

Geoffrey Bourne is co-founder of Jamdesk - the best software documentation platform.