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Getting a Hey Invite Code using a Twitter Bot

I usually keep a template at my disposal for these hunts. If you haven't read my previous blog post already, I highly recommend you do so. It gives a nice introduction to creating your first app on Twitter and your getting your first bot up and running.

Before starting to code, I first spent some time examining what keywords/phrases people used when discussing Hey. I kept track of those keywords and realized the most popular ones were the following:

['hey invite', 'hey code', '#hey', 'hey.com']

I then discovered that Hey invite codes were 7 character alphanumeric strings, so I created a regex pattern that can be used to match possible codes in tweets:

/\b[A-z0-9]{7}\b/g

Obviously this isn't perfect; if there are words that are 7 characters, it will match those unwanted words. I was fine with some manual labor.

After this research phase, I decided to whip out my Twitter-bot-invite-code-hunter (yes, this is what I call it). It utilizes the Twit library to use Twitter's API with ease. The initial setup includes importing the library and setting up the keys for your app:

var Twit = require('twit');
var T = new Twit({
    consumer_key:         '...',
    consumer_secret:      '...',
    access_token:         '...',
    access_token_secret:  '...',
})

After that, we can use streams to listen to new tweets while tracking specific keywords, namely, the ones I mentioned above:

var stream = T.stream('statuses/filter', { track: ['hey invite', 'hey code', '#hey', 'hey.com'] });

After this is done, we listen to this stream on every new tweet as follows:

stream.on('tweet', function (tweet) {
})

Now we have a tweet object. To learn more about what attributes these objects have, I recommend you check out Twitter's official documentation on Tweet objects at https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/tweets/data-dictionary/overview/tweet-object.

It turns out tweet has an attribute called text, which as the name suggests, contains the text of the tweet. Now, we can match it against our regex pattern as follows:

match_res = tweet.text.match(/\b[A-z0-9]{7}\b/g)

match_res now contains the words that match the criteria we need. We can then do the following:

console.log(tweet.text)
if (match_res != null) {
    console.log("IMPORTNAT: " + match_res)
    console.log("")
}
console.log("")

This will check if any words matched, and if they did then it'll print them out. Aaaand that's pretty much it. The bot is ready to run.

🤑 Was it successful?

I was really hoping it would be as easy as getting those Fortnite and CoD codes (those took less than 5 minutes). Sadly, I waited for over 2 hours for this to work because the codes started pouring out when new Hey invites were sent out.

After about 2 hours of waiting I saw someone who tweeted a code, I was really excited so I quickly opened Hey and put in the code and it worked!!

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