Getting Started with Python and Zapier to make Bots

We will use Python and Zapier to make a Twitter bot that tweets a joke hourly.

Here is the twitter bot we will be building https://twitter.com/jokebot13

Zapier is a tool that lets you automate tasks and create workflows by integrating various apps. Some things you could do using Zapier

Make a price tracker which notifies you when the price is less than X $
Get an alert in Slack/Discord when you get an email from a specific email id
Tweet an update whenever some RSS Feed is updated

and many more things. For most of them, you won’t need to code in Python or JavaScript. The in-built apps provided by Zapier are more than sufficient. However, if you wish to, you can execute small Python scripts as well. We will be working with Python and Zapier in this tutorial.

Before proceeding, let’s discuss some of the limitations with Zapier’s support for Python

With the free version, we can only run short scripts which take <1s to execute
We can not install external modules. Only the following external modules are available

requests: an easy-to-use HTTP client.

StoreClient : a built-in utility for storing and retrieving data between Zap runs.

What will be building?

We will build a Twitter bot. The Twitter bot is going to fetch a random joke using the official joke API. We will also add a feature that lets a user specify the list of hashtags to include in each tweet.

The bot will tweet the joke along with the hashtags hourly.

Steps to build the bot

Step1: Python script to make a request to the API

We will use the requests library and make a GET request to the jokes API. Below is the code snippet to make the request

The jokes are in the form of a question and answer so we will need to format the text before tweeting it. We will also need to add the hashtags at the end.

Code snippet to format Tweet — Formatting Tweet

We will create an empty list to store the question, answer, hashtags, and some dot characters.
The join() method will be used to create the final tweet
Before using the hashtags, we need to add the hash character and create a string with all the hashtags

Below is a sample tweet

Now that we are done with the tweet, we can move on to the next step.

Step2: Setup Zapier Account and Create a Zap

Apps created in Zapier are known as Zaps

Go to https://zapier.com/ and Sign up for free
After you have signed up, log in to your account
Click on ‘Make A Zap’ in the left side-bar

Step3: Setup a trigger

Every Zap requires a trigger. A trigger is basically an event that will run the Zap. Some possible triggers are

Receiving an email
Receiving a PR on Github
RSS feed being updates
Receiving a message on Slack
Receiving an order in WooCommerce
A Schedule, i.e hourly, daily, weekly, monthly

Since we want to tweet daily, we will select the schedule trigger and select daily. It is the first item on the right column

For the ‘Trigger Event’ option, chose ‘Every Hour’ and click on ‘Continue’
Next, you can select if you wish to run the trigger on weekends
After you click continue, your trigger should be created
You can click on Test Trigger to run the trigger.

Success Message after running trigger — Trigger Success

You should see the above message if your trigger ran successfully.

Step4: Adding the Python Script

Click on the ‘+’ button or the “Add Action” Button

Search for “code” and Select “Code by Zapier”. It is the first item in the search result in the screenshot
For the option “Action Event”, chose “Run Python”

To enter inputs, click on the ‘+’ button in the ‘Input Data’ Section. To access the inputs, we just need to access the dictionary ‘input_data’. All the values are stored as strings, i.e the value for the key hashtags is actually stored as a string and not a list.

To convert it into a list, we can use the eval() function. The same works for dictionary values.