Making an auto-updating Twitter banner in Python

I used to use blackmagic.so’s auto-banner updater, but I realised that it’s pretty common nowadays and making one on my own would be soo much cooler. Also, the real-time banner provided by Blackmagic didn’t really look good

By the way, you should follow this guy. He’s a great dev with amazing content

As opposed to:

You should also follow this guy. His followers has been decreasing since quite a long time

Jokes aside, determined to make this on my own with basically 0 knowledge of the Twitter API, this wasn’t gonna be easy. but it kinda was

Starting out - the twitter api

Oh boi, don’t even get me started on the Twitter API. it’s a complete mess. There are 2 versions, both are completely different. Getting authentication keys is a mess, all links lead to the same article, and the articles don’t even give the solution, they only give the meaning of the problem. there are like 5 different keys you need to authenticate a user

Anyways, I made the API keys by creating an app on the dashboard and dumped them into a .env file. I didn’t even know what the keys did yet

I knew of a python module for twitter - tweepy that’s quite easy to use, with good documentation

Then there was the login part, which was honestly quite easy to do.

One thing, I didn’t have the Write access in my Oauth yet, and this caused a lot of headache later on

class ProfileBanner:
    def __init__(self):
        self.client = self.__login()
 
    def __login(self):
        """Logins and sets access tokens"""
        auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(env["CONSUMER_KEY"], env["CONSUMER_SECRET"])
        auth.set_access_token(env["ACCESS_TOKEN"], env["ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET"])
        api = tweepy.API(auth)
        api.verify_credentials()
        return api

I decided to use twitter API V1 because I tried V2 and it was a pain to set up

Getting latest followers

I only need the 5 latest followers, just their profile pictures. So I wrote this function that gets the profile pictures as bytes and stores them in a list

def __get_latest_followers_images(self) -> list[io.BytesIO]:
        """Gets all the latest follower images"""
        latest_followers = self.client.get_followers(
            user_id=env.get("USER_ID"), count=5
        )
        images = []
 
        for follower in latest_followers:
            response = requests.get(follower.profile_image_url)
            images.append(io.BytesIO(response.content))
        return images

The __ (double underscore) before function makes it inaccessible outside the class, basically a private function. This is good because we don't wanna make many functions public and keep the API as simple as possible (https://twitter.com/DhravyaShah/status/1500911400486531072)

Creating the image

Now is the kinda easy part. Making the image. I already have the follower’s profile pics and just had to paste it onto the template

I created this template on canva, really cool design isn’t it

Now, by getting the coordinates of the first image and the diameter of each image in pixels, I could easily just paste all the images one by one. This is what I ended up with:

def __image_factory(self, savepath: str = None) -> Image:
        """
        Pastes the image onto the template
        """
        template = Image.open("template.png")
        images = self.__get_latest_followers_images()
        for i, image in enumerate(images):
            image = Image.open(image)
            image = image.resize((self.IMAGE_DIA, self.IMAGE_DIA))
 
            # Make image circle
            mask = Image.new("L", (self.IMAGE_DIA, self.IMAGE_DIA), 0)
            draw = ImageDraw.Draw(mask)
            draw.ellipse((0, 0, self.IMAGE_DIA, self.IMAGE_DIA), fill=255)
            image.putalpha(mask)
 
            # Paste the image onto the template
            template.paste(
                image,
                (
                    self.FIRST_IMAGE_COORDS[0] + (i * self.IMAGE_DIA),
                    self.FIRST_IMAGE_COORDS[1],
                ),
                image,
            )
 
        if savepath:
            template.save(savepath)
        return template

Updating the banner

Now all I have to do is update the banner. Here’s the simple script that does that

	  def __update_banner(self) -> None:
        """Updates the banner"""
        self.__image_factory(savepath="banner.png")
        self.client.update_profile_banner("banner.png")
 
    def update_every_few_minutes(self, minutes:int = 2):
        """Starts the update loop"""
        while True:
            self.__update_banner()
            print("Updated banner")
            time.sleep(60*minutes)

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAANDDDD BOOM! Done!

if __name__ == "__main__":
    banner = ProfileBanner()
    banner.update_every_few_minutes()

Deploying

I deployed the project on pm2 on a VPS I bought from Epikhost.

pm2 start main.py --interpreter python3.9 --name twitter-banner

Thanks for reading!

Thanks for reading my boring blog.