---
title: Fetching Twitter Bookmarks with Ruby
slug: fetching-twitter-bookmarks-with-ruby
published_at: 2022-07-07 12:00:33 +0000
updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:13:30 +0000
summary: 
description: In this episode, we&#39;ll create a Twitter client for the V2 API and add methods for fetching our users&#39; bookmarks.   Code: https://github.com/cjavdev/bookmarks-search-rails #rails #rubyonrails
tags: [cjav_dev, web development tutorials, web development for beginners, vim, ruby, rails, javascript, Twitter API, bookmarks, Twitter Client]
views: 998
author: CJ Avilla
url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/fetching-twitter-bookmarks-with-ruby
youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kK-EWp9oRoY
youtube_id: kK-EWp9oRoY
embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/kK-EWp9oRoY
thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/kK-EWp9oRoY/hqdefault.jpg
type: video
---

# Fetching Twitter Bookmarks with Ruby

*Published: July 07, 2022*
*Views: 998*

## Watch

[Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kK-EWp9oRoY)

[![Fetching Twitter Bookmarks with Ruby](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/kK-EWp9oRoY/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kK-EWp9oRoY)

## Description

In this episode, we&#39;ll create a Twitter client for the V2 API and add methods for fetching our users&#39; bookmarks. 

Code: https://github.com/cjavdev/bookmarks-search-rails
#rails #rubyonrails

## Transcript

welcome back my friends we are building out a a twitter demo where we can uh look at our bookmarks filter sort by different stuff that&#39;s based on the annotations the contextual annotations that are added by twitter&#39;s machine learning and we&#39;re doing this with ruby on rails so in the last episode we went through and did authentication so if you haven&#39;t set up twitter auth inside of a inside of your rails app head over and take a look at that episode in this episode we&#39;re going to go out and build out a little ruby client for interacting with the twitter api so in uh let&#39;s see so the way i want to do this is i&#39;m actually just going to create a new directory inside of app called twitter and that&#39;s going to contain a new thing called twitterclient.rb and i&#39;m going to start out very simply and we&#39;re going to have just a couple different methods so the the first kind of like test method that i want is something like me and by calling me on an instance of the twitter client i should expect to get back the data about my own sort of twitter user and so i&#39;m going to um initialize all of these the clients with a specific user so i&#39;m going to pass in the user here from our database i&#39;m going to store that off so that we can use its token now me what i want to do this is going to be a get request to like slash user slash me and this method this get method doesn&#39;t exist yet so i want to define that so we&#39;re going to have this new method called get we&#39;ll make this private too so no one calls this from outside and this is going to take in the path and that should be a good start so um let&#39;s see here i guess get will like reach down into request with we&#39;ll pass in like the method symbol and also the path and then inside of this other request method we&#39;ll take in the method we&#39;ll take in the path and then we&#39;ll take in any like body which might be just kind of like a hash or something or uh i don&#39;t know i i think ultimately the post post bodies for the twitter api are json encoded so we&#39;ll just to string that that thing and deal with actually we&#39;ll just deal with post requests later for now we only really need get requests so um let&#39;s see so uh what we want to do let&#39;s actually use rest clients so the rest rest client gem um okay so rest client great little http client very simple um has this execute method where we can basically pass like lots of raw stuff and we don&#39;t have to use any of their built-in things so let&#39;s use restclient.restclient.request.execute.com what does that look like so it takes in the method it also takes in the headers and maybe a payload so this should be a good start for us all right um so there&#39;s going to be some standard headers that we want to pass and there&#39;s going to be some base url that we want to concatenate with our path so let&#39;s add in a constant here called base url and that&#39;s going to be something like api.twitter.com2 i think documentation for users all right the api reference for user slash me so yeah api.twitter.com2 slash user slash me so that is the right base url and then here i guess we can construct some like params and then we&#39;ll use those params as what we pass in so we&#39;ll just pull these up here and our method is going to be whatever was passed in our url is going to be our base url plus our path our payload we might not actually have a payload so like if method is put um or method is post then params payload is body.2.json i&#39;m not sure if that&#39;s going to work but we&#39;ll see okay and then in terms of headers i think we want some standard headers um so we&#39;ll just go down here and say headers and we&#39;ll return something that looks like this authorization and bearer with our users token i think we&#39;re also going to need maybe like a user agent we&#39;ll call this something like i don&#39;t know uh rails bookmark search and okay so i think that&#39;s going to be okay and then i guess like also if the method is put or post then our headers so params headers we&#39;ll want to add a content type of application json all of this doesn&#39;t really matter too much the one other thing i wanted to do though was wrap up our request in a try catch block or a begin rescue block so that if it fails we we can look at that failure and tell what&#39;s going on um so rails.logger.err e and then we also want to return like e dot response so the res the actual response when the rest client request fails is available on e.response so we can always get access to that so we&#39;re going to execute this and pass in params and i guess that&#39;s going to give us back the response and i think we want to do json.parse response.body and we want to symbolize the names of that json that comes back i guess we&#39;ll also let&#39;s do the same thing for this response json.purse we&#39;ll just assume that that is well-formed uh and if not then we&#39;ll have to figure out what we want to do with that um now we have something that will like always return um some valid json now i wanted to show you something cool that you can do with ruby it turns out that if you um don&#39;t want to wrap a specific part of your code in the begin block then you can actually omit the begin and the end like if you don&#39;t need stuff after the end and then you can use like the whole method block like the whole method above the rescue as sort of like the begin area and then you can have rescue at the same level as death i don&#39;t know kind of fancy funky um whatever maybe this is more confusing because if you have a if we have an error up here that&#39;ll also get caught and it definitely won&#39;t have a response body but whatever like i just wanted to kind of show that okay let&#39;s see what we&#39;ve got going on now so we should have we should be able to initialize a twitter client passing any user we should be able to call users me and that will make a get request passing down the path which will construct some params that look like this they do include the headers the headers have our token and the authorization tool all right so let&#39;s let&#39;s just let&#39;s give this a whirl so we&#39;re going to say rails uh nope rails console now let&#39;s say like the client is twitter client.new user.last and now we want to say okay headers is unexpected missing a comma there all right so c dot me oh no uh oh it&#39;s undefined okay because we need to add it to the bundle so bundle add rest client that should be the name of the gem it used to have like a weird thing with the name one of the names said underscores or didn&#39;t have underscores or something um it was super confusing but uh it seems to be sort of uh cleaned up by now so now we can say dot c dot me oh boom look at that okay we got back our our own data this is amazing this is great this is exactly what we want and we&#39;re able to like hit the twitter api with that token that we got in the previous episode and get back our own sort of twitter information now inside of this example the thing that that&#39;s like really interesting is that they fetch your bookmarks and so i guess what we could do is like yeah let&#39;s let&#39;s update our client here our twitter client to add a new method called bookmarks and this is going to be a get request to users slash the id of the user so at user dot twitter id um slash bookmarks and this should get our bookmarks so if i just say reload c to bookmarks now i need a new instance of a twitter client c.bookmarks boom there&#39;s our bookmarks isn&#39;t that so quick and easy i love it okay so we&#39;ve got a bunch of bookmarks here there&#39;s a there&#39;s 13 results i haven&#39;t bookmarked a ton so we might have to go bookmark some stuff just to like get things to simulate but um there&#39;s a couple really cool things we can do with the twitter api so let&#39;s actually look over here for bookmarks so i want to like just do a search for bookmarks and okay bookmarks api reference so here is how we get a user&#39;s bookmarks it&#39;s user to bookmarks um and there is some rate limit we can only do 180 requests per 15-minute window per authenticated user that&#39;s important if we want to like paginate through and fetch all the bookmarks i think we can get a hundred at a time so that gives us what is that uh 1 800 or whatever i don&#39;t know one eight one 1 800 um okay but what i wanted to look at is these query parameters so we can pass in expansions and one of those expansions is the author id so as we&#39;re listing out our bookmarks we want to show like the who wrote the bookmark or who is the author of the bookmark and a couple other things so if we look back at the code that they have here we can see expansion no let&#39;s it&#39;s going to be they they pass it down from the front end so expansions okay so this is kind of the stuff that they add tweet fields expansions for the author id and the user fields they want to see if the user is verified and get their profile image so let&#39;s add these same expansions so like what we really want to do is add a query string here that&#39;s something like tweet fields equals and then this thing here that looks like this context annotations comma created at um and then an ampersand and some other stuff but it becomes a little bit hard to maintain if we&#39;re kind of like just hard coding this query string so instead what i want to do is add just like query here and then i&#39;m going to add a new thing query is equal to a hash.2 query and now i can plop in whatever sort of stuff i want to inside of here now this is not like a super reusable twitter client this is like very strictly just for what we want in practice i would probably make it so i can you know take in a user id and maybe take in the you know the query params or something and then i would call like queryparams.2 query here and pass those down but we&#39;re just kind of like hard coding a bunch of stuff here to keep it to keep it super simple as we get started so we&#39;re going to start with tweet fields points at that&#39;s not going to work because it has a dot in it but whatever um this thing so we&#39;re gonna put we&#39;re gonna make this a string a symbolized string it&#39;s like a civilized string civilized um expansions author id and then what is this one this one is going to be user fields and which which fields do we care about well we care about the verified and profile image url fields okay we don&#39;t actually care about verified nobody cares about fear right you don&#39;t want that check mark i would love the check mark but i don&#39;t have it so i&#39;m a little bit salty so that&#39;s just how it is all right so we say get twitter user id bookmarks we pass in this query string and i don&#39;t know let&#39;s give it a whirl let&#39;s see so reload and then we want to make a new twitter client and see bookmarks boom okay this is awesome all right so we got back a bunch of bookmarks but what you&#39;ll notice is that there&#39;s a bunch of other data here like uh particularly this context annotations which is so crazy like it&#39;s so neat this context annotations is like the machine learning things that twitter thinks about this tweet so it&#39;s this tweet says i don&#39;t just tip a letter okay i saw this thing and i was laughing i don&#39;t actually i there was like i don&#39;t know it&#39;s kind of trendy right now i don&#39;t tip well at a restaurant i bust my table i see the next group and i&#39;m in the kitchen blanching fries um and then inside of the context annotations it knows that this is something about a person trixie mattel an entertainment personality in the world like anderson koopa or miranda springs okay so um so there&#39;s two pieces of each context annotation there&#39;s a domain and an entity so there&#39;s the domain and the entity this entity or this domain&#39;s id is 10 and the entity is the entity&#39;s id is this thing so this is a person whose name is trixie mattel um so what we&#39;re going to do is try to build up some like smart folders based on these context annotations we&#39;re also going to build up and print out sort of information about the author so we use that expansion technique or we passed in expansion for the author id you&#39;ll notice that when we&#39;re looking at the actual bookmark the author id is at the top here but the author information is not embedded in the data about the bookmark that&#39;s because it&#39;s pretty common or you might imagine that you would probably bookmark a ton of things from the same author and rather than including all of that data along with that bookmark every single time they don&#39;t plop it inside of the data they plop it down inside of this includes so down here we have a second object that comes back which is this sort of collection of users and this user&#39;s id will tie back to the author id of of the tweet that we bookmarked okay so let&#39;s work on building out our ui for this so we&#39;ve got some bookmarks let&#39;s go rails g rails g controller bookmarks we&#39;re gonna start with an index and we&#39;re gonna kind of just start with um adding in here resources bookmarks bookmarks controller and we&#39;re going to say something like um we want to create a new twitter client with our current user and then we want to call like bookmarks is client.bookmarks and then on our bookmarks index we&#39;re gonna just render out like a pre tag of the json for those bookmarks pretty generate it should make it so that it has spaces but we&#39;re missing a current user so this is going to just fail for now okay uninitialized constant bookmarks controller twitter client i think that&#39;s because we haven&#39;t restarted the server we haven&#39;t we also haven&#39;t set up a current user so this should feel okay undefined local variable or method current user so let&#39;s jump into our application controller and add a method for current user it&#39;s going to be something like user.find by the id of session user id okay this is going to map back to our um the the thing that we tagged here or like cookied right here so when the when the user first logs in we create that user in that user model in the database then we take their id and we put it into the session or like into the cookie and then what that means is that for every subsequent request that user makes we&#39;re going to be able to look that user up in the database by id and i&#39;m using find by id here so we don&#39;t get a 400 and i&#39;m going to say at current user or equals that so that we sort of memoize it we don&#39;t have to look it up a bunch of times in case we need to call current user a bunch of times so here i&#39;m going to say i&#39;m going to make another method called require user and this is going to just say like if there&#39;s no current user we&#39;re going to redirect to the root page where they can log in so we&#39;re gonna go back to our bookmarks controller say b4 action require user and let&#39;s refresh great okay so there&#39;s no bookmarks why is there no bookmarks okay there it is i don&#39;t know what that happened i was odd all right we have our bookmarks they&#39;re rendering on the page and let&#39;s see named people in the world like nelson mandela okay what what in the world is this okay i okay so let&#39;s see there&#39;s there&#39;s definitely some other things that i&#39;ve bookmarked uh uh let&#39;s see you don&#39;t have to be a uh you don&#39;t have to contribute code to contribute to open source yes you could totally just write docs or file bugs or whatever um so let&#39;s call that good for this episode in the next episode we&#39;ll go through and we&#39;ll build out a ui for rendering out these bookmarks we&#39;ll build out a ui for the smart form or the smart folders and things like that thanks so much for watching uh hopefully this was useful and yeah we&#39;ll see you in the next one cheers [Music]

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