Tweeting with an image using Node JS

Introduction

This is my fourth tutorial about using Twitter API with Node JS. My previous tutorials are listed up there 👆.

In my first tutorial, I showed how to tweet with only text using Twitter API and Node JS, see here.
Then I got a question on how to tweet with an image, thanks to @thomasbnt and @generativexbot , so here I'll explain my way to do this.

Before we start

You need to have a Twitter Developer account and for the basic configurations please go here for more explanation as I follow the same structure.

Let's start

To tweet an image, the process will consist of two requests:
1- Uploading the image
2- Tweeting with that image

• The new thing here is that each request uses a different subdomain in the Twitter API url, which means that a small change will be done on the config.js file.

const twitter = require('twitter-lite');

exports.newClient = function (subdomain = 'api') {
    return new twitter({
        subdomain,
        consumer_key: '',
        consumer_secret: '',
        access_token_key: '',
        access_token_secret: ''
    });
}

• Here I changed the configurations to be returned as a function instead of a JSON object. The function returns a twitter lite client that I moved its definition here for simplicity. The reason I did that is the new configuration attribute subdomain, which can be set from the function parameter.

-Now, we are ready to edit the index.js file. Some changes must be made after changing the config.js file:
1- Remove twitter lite definition
2- Define twitter lite clients for both subdomains to be used later

const apiClient = config.newClient();
const uploadClient = config.newClient('upload');

• I got this photo to be used with the tweet
  

• Then we deal with the image file and make it ready for the upload by defining the fs and path modules.
  

const fs = require('fs');
const path = require('path');

• Then, read the file as a 64 based file.

const mediaFile = fs.readFileSync(path.join(__dirname, 'hello_world.png'));
const base64image = Buffer.from(mediaFile).toString('base64');

• Next, it's similar to what we did in this tutorial where a request is depending on the result of another request.

• The first request is for uploading image using media/upload endpoint and the uploading subdomain. This means using uploadClient here and returns an object with media_id attribute which we save for the next step.
  

// Uploading an image
uploadClient.post('media/upload', { media_data: base64image })
    .then(media => {

    console.log('You successfully uploaded media');

    var media_id = media.media_id_string;
}).catch(console.error);

• You can see full details for this request here.

• The second request is the normal tweeting using statuses/update endpoint to tweet with the image, which uses the apiClient.
  

// tweeting with text and image
apiClient.post('statuses/update', { status: 'Hello world!', media_ids: media_id })
    .then(tweet => {

    console.log('Your image tweet is posted successfully');
}).catch(console.error);

• You can see full details for this request here.

• everything in place now and we can run the app in Command Prompt using:
  

node index.js

• That's it and your image is added to your tweet and takes its place in your friends timeline 😁.

Here's is the full code for index.js file:

const fs = require('fs');
const path = require('path');
const config = require('./config');
const apiClient = config.newClient();
const uploadClient = config.newClient('upload');

const mediaFile = fs.readFileSync(path.join(__dirname, 'hello_world.png'));
const base64image = Buffer.from(mediaFile).toString('base64');

uploadClient.post('media/upload', { media_data: base64image })
    .then(media => {

    console.log('You successfully uploaded media');

    var media_id = media.media_id_string;
    apiClient.post('statuses/update', { status: 'Hello world!', media_ids: media_id })
        .then(tweet => {

        console.log('Your image tweet is posted successfully');
    }).catch(console.error);

}).catch(console.error);

In the following tutorial, we are going to explore more about twitter API. I have several ideas to share with you, so stay tuned 😉

For the full code, you can visit my github page.

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