Advanced Features
Direct Client Access
If you want to do something not provided directly by Chatterbot, you have access to an instance of Twitter::Client provided by the client method. In theory, you can do something like this in your bot to unfollow users who DM you:
client.direct_messages_received(:since_id => since_id).each do |m|
client.unfollow(m.user.name)
end
Storing Config in the Database
Sometimes it is preferable to store the authorization credentials for your bot in a database.
Chatterbot can manage configurations that are stored in the database, but to do this you will need to specify how to connect to the database. You can do this by specifying the connection string either in one of the global config files by setting
:db_uri:mysql://username:password@host/database
Or you can specify the connection on the command-line by using the –db=”db_uri” configuration option. Any calls to the database are handled by the Sequel gem, and MySQL and Sqlite should work. The DB URI should be in the form of
mysql://username:password@host/database
see http://sequel.rubyforge.org/rdoc/files/doc/opening_databases_rdoc.html for details.
Logging Tweets to the Database
Chatterbot can log tweet activity to a database if desired. This can be handy for archival purposes, or for tracking what’s going on with your bot.
If you’ve configured your bot for database access, you can store a
tweet to the database by calling the log method like this:
search "chatterbot" do |tweet|
log tweet
end
See Chatterbot::Logging for details on this.
Streaming
Chatterbot has basic support for Twitter’s Streaming API. You can read more about it here