brummetj/bitly-intern-challenge

Bitly API internship challenge 2018

Bitly API internship challenge 2018

Joshua Brummet

[email protected]

Introduction

For your internship challenge, I developed a library that acts as both a Router and Wrapper to both the Bitly API and Twitter API, written in go. With this library, you can submit a new tweet with some text. If there is a URL present in your string, it will replace this URL with a bitly link and submit the tweet to your twitter account.

This library was built to make quick responses to twitter with bitly links.

For example... Let us say someone uses Twitter as a marketing tool, and they have items they sell with URI's that you would describe as a 'Deep link' or a 'Long Url'. This library API could make it so someone can quickly market their item as a Bitly link on their twitter account. This person can utilize all the valuable information you guys provide fast and easy with one HTTP request to their own endpoint!! :)

If there is no URL present in the form value then it will simply just submit a tweet to your account.

I went with a MVC designed structured API. But since there is no views, and this is technically a library you can use built around several other packages.

I designed it as

• The controllers
  • These handle each request to the APIs
• The Route handlers
  • These will determine your API path and call the corresponding controller.
• The models
  • These model each response that comes back from the HTTP requests.

Built upon this functionality, this library also includes the following endpoints.

• /v3/user/link_save
• /v3/user/link_history
• /v3/user/clicks

The twitter endpoints used are

• /1.1/statuses/update.json
• /1.1/account/verify_credentials.json

In order to use the Twitter functionality with the library, this will require you to set up a quick app and get your user credentials. This will take only take a moment to set up. Just go to this link

Once you have created your app you will need to get the following tokens

• TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN
• TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET
• TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY
• TWITTER_CONSUMER_SECRET

---

How to Run :)

To run the library you can either use the folder I have provided with you guys, or simply just use the google go package I created. This package will include all the dependencies so there is no need to install the library dependencies when testing.

• go get -u github.com/brummetj/bitly-intern-challenge

If you decide to use the folder as a package here is a list of dependencies you will need to install.

• go get -u github.com/gorilla/mux
• go get -u github.com/kurrik/twittergo
• go get -u github.com/kurrik/oauth1a
• go get -u mvdan.cc/xurls

mkdir A new directory, cd inside and let's call our new bitly app.. app.go

Authentication

You will want to touch a new text file that will hold your twitter credentials. I call mine CREDENTIALS.txt. NOTE: I have provided a function so you can just export the tokens as OS variables if that is easier for you.

Inside the CREDENTIALS.txt insert the tokens in the following order.

<TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY>
<TWITTER_CONSUMER_SECRET
<TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN>
<TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET>

If you decide to use OS variables just run for each variable in the command line such as. Maker sure you use all caps! export TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY=<YOUR_TOKEN>

Your folder structure should look like this.

-dir
   -- app.go
   -- CREDENTIALS.txt

For the bitly API I use an exported variable for my credentials to access your API.

Simply in the command line do export BITLY_ACCESS_TOKEN=<YOUR_TOKEN>

You will get token errors and be unable to run the API without this OS variable.

This will allow each bitly endpoint to be successful.

Using

Inside your app.go you can just copy this following code.

package main

import "github.com/brummetj/bitly-intern-challenge"

func main(){
    
    r := bitly.NewBitlyRouter("5000")

    r.GetTwitterCredFile("./CREDENTIALS.txt")
     
  //r.GetTwitterCredEnv()
  
    r.VerifyTwitterCred()
    
    r.HandleLinkHistory("/link_history")
    
    r.HandleLinkSave("/link_save")
    
    r.HandleUserClicks("/user_clicks")
    
    r.HandleTweetBitlyUpdate("/tweet")
    
    r.Listen()
}

To Run please type go run app.go

You will see a message on which port you running.

Open up Postman and you can start making requests to your localhost endpoints which will respond to the Bitly and Twitter API.

NOTE: if you plan to you use the source code as your package dependency, make sure you install the listed dependencies. You will also want to include the source code in a dir outside of app.go

package main

import "../bitly-intern-challenge"

And the folder structure will look like

-dir
  -src
    -- app.go
    -- CREDENTIALS.txt
  -bitly-intern-challenge

Bitly Router & Listen

The bitly router is built on top of gorilla's Mux package. Declaring bitly.NewBitlyRouter("5000") Will instantiate a new router that can be used to declare each handler and its endpoint. This function will take an argument as a port number. This is so you can have multiple local servers running on different ports. You can also declare a new router and write any handle built off this library.

The BitlyRouter has to always be the first variable declared in order to use each handler

Listen() is needed at the end of your func main(). This will make the API live and ready to use!!

Twitter Creds

r.GetTwitterCredFile("./CREDENTIALS.txt") will simply look for the CREDENTIALS.txt file in your dir, and authenticate you to Twitter to make calls to their API. This function is needed before making and handler endpoints to Twitter.

alternatively you can use r.GetTwitterCredEnv() if OS variables are declared as above.

r.VerifyTwitterCred() Will verify if you have successfully connected to Twitter or not.

If you don't have a CREDENTIALS file in the dir and call GetTwitterCredFile you will get a compile error.

Handlers

Each handler will take an endpoint, and allow you to make calls to the endpoint depending on the HTTP request. Most of the handlers declared in the library are just GET requests. The twitter / bitly handler is a POST request. They all will respond in JSON.

All Tests are used with Postman, feel free to CURL or use the web browser for getting requests.

• GET Request
• r.HandleLinkHistory("/link_history")
  • This will retrieve a response from v3/user/link_history in the bitly API.

Test Response from HandleLinkHistory("/link_history")

• GET localhost:5000/link_history

{
    "data": {
        "link_history": [
            {
                "has_link_deeplinks": false,
                "archived": false,
                "user_ts": 1522789253,
                "title": "Mr. E by Metroplane | Free Listening on SoundCloud",
                "created_at": 1522789253,
                "tags": [],
                "modified_at": 1522789253,
                "campaign_ids": [],
                "private": true,
                "aggregate_link": "http://bit.ly/20KUVJU",
                "long_url": "https://soundcloud.com/metroplane/metroplane-mr-e",
                "client_id": "a5e8cebb233c5d07e5c553e917dffb92fec5264d",
                "link": "http://bit.ly/2H6JLwn",
                "is_domain_deeplink": false,
                "encoding_user": {
                    "login": "o_5hfavnimd",
                    "display_name": "Joshua Brummet",
                    "full_name": "Joshua Brummet"
                }
            },

---

• GET Request
• Query: longUrl
• r.HandleLinkSave("/link_save")
  • This will retrieve a response from v3/user/link_save in the bitly API.

Test Response from HandleLinkSave("/link_save")

• GET localhost:5000/link_save?longUrl=https://codeburst.io/6-interesting-apis-to-check-out-in-2018-5d6830063f29

{
    "status_code": 200,
    "data": {
        "link_save": {
            "link": "http://bit.ly/2EkT3Sw",
            "aggregate_link": "http://bit.ly/2Cqg1eC",
            "long_url": "https://codeburst.io/6-interesting-apis-to-check-out-in-2018-5d6830063f29",
            "new_link": 1,
            "user_hash": "2EkT3Sw"
        }
    },
    "status_txt": "OK"
}

---

• GET Request
• r.HandleUserClicks("/user_clicks")
  • This will retrieve a response from v3/user/clicks in the bitly API.

Test Response from HandleUserClicks("/user_clicks")

• GET localhost:5000/user_clicks

{
    "status_code": 200,
    "data": {
        "days": 7,
        "day_start": 0,
        "clicks": [
            {
                "clicks": 0,
                "day_start": 1522728000
            },
            {
                "clicks": 0,
                "day_start": 1522641600
            },
            {
                "clicks": 0,
                "day_start": 1522555200
            },
            {
                "clicks": 0,
                "day_start": 1522468800
            },
            {
                "clicks": 3,
                "day_start": 1522382400
            },
            {
                "clicks": 1,
                "day_start": 1522296000
            },
            {
                "clicks": 0,
                "day_start": 1522209600
            }
        ]
    },
    "status_txt": "OK"
}

---

• POST Request
• r.HandleTweetBitlyUpdate("/tweets")
  • This will retrieve a response from /1.1/statuses/update.json in the Twitter API.

Test Response from HandleTweetBitlyUpdate("/tweets")

• POST localhost:5000/tweets
  • x-www-form-urlencoded
  • Key = status
  • Value = Hey there ! https://golang.org/

{
    "Id": 981257126097006592,
    "Tweet": "Hey there ! https://t.co/UUpoxF7Pcp",
    "User": "Joshua Brummet"
}

For simplicity purposes, I weeded out most of the twitter response to save the time of creating a model for twitters API response.

Here screenshot of my twitter account with the new bitly / twitter update!

---

Conclusion

With this API go wrapper you can quickly submit bitly links to twitter through the API router that I built with your own endpoints!

Thanks for giving me this opportunity with your summer internship. I hope you enjoy the Library I built for you. Feel free to dive into the source code and ask any questions if needed!

Some extra cool facts about me:

• My favorite color is blue
• I like techno music
• I'm from Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

Looking forward to be hearing from you soon.