npm:social-crawler

README

In progress of factoring out of feedbot and socdb.

Only for twitter at the moment, but should work for other social networks eventually.

State is kept in PostgreSQL, between & during runs.

Use something like:

const Crawler = require('social-crawler')

const config = {}  // use env vars if omitted here
// where we store the data
//  PGDATABASE or config.pgDatabase
//  PGPASSWORD or config.pgPassword
// what user we access twitter as
//  TWUSERTOKEN or config.tw.userToken
//  TWUSERTOKENSECRET or config.tw.userTokenSecret
const crawler = new Crawler(config)

// if you want crawling in this process; without this, you can still
read the database, but it wont do any new fetches.
crawler.start()

// if you want to shut down the crawling; necessary if you want the
// process to exit cleanly, because otherwise it's just waiting for more
// stuff to appear
crawler.stop()

// add stuff to the queue, which flows out as priorities for related things
// via computeContacts()
crawler.setUserPriority(id, priority)
crawler.setPostPriority(id, priority)

crawler.users()  // iterator
crawler.posts()  // iterator
crawler.userPosts(user) // iter, what we have so far
crawler.followers(user) // iter, what we have so far
crawler.leaders(user) // iter,  what we have so far
crawler.contactPosts(user)

const stat = crawler.status()
// status.postsFetched
// status.postsFetchable
// status.followersFetched
// status.leadersFetched
// status.contactPostsFetched
// status.contactPostsFetchable


// Who are the contacts (from leaders, followers, posts, etc) and how
// important are they?  You can provide this function if you don't like
// the default: leaders are weight 10, followers weight 1, plus 1
// point for any like / 3 points for any boost, in the past 90 days.

crawler.computeContacts = async user => {
   // Look at followers, leaders, posts, etc, to compute
   // a weighted table of contacts. 
   // 
   // Return a Set mapping contact -> weight.
   // 
   // All weights turn into priorities by * 0.001 * user priority
}

Usage no npm install needed!

README