Building an OpenWrt twitter client

Alright, I was looking through the referrers to my blog, and saw this search term that came from google.com “openwrt twitter client”.

I have no idea why you would want a twitter client on your router, but still, I was inspired to write a simple script that would allow you to tweet from the commandline of your OpenWrt router.

First I thought you should just use wget, but the wget that is part of busybox does not include the option to POST data, so a real script was needed.

First of, you need to generate a base64 string of your username and password, on a computer that have the base64 program installed, like this:

bredsaal@apex:~$ echo -n "bredsaal:mypassword" | base64
YnJlZHNhYWw6bXlwYXNzd29yZA==

Copy the resulting string into the AUTHENTICATION variable in the script.

#!/bin/sh

# every parameter after $0 is going to be in the tweet.
TWEET="status=$*"

# Generate the authentication string on your commandline
# echo -n "username:password" | base64
# and insert below.
AUTHENTICATION=""

CONTENT_LENGTH=`echo -n $TWEET | wc -c`

MESSAGE="
POST /statuses/update.xml HTTP/1.1
Host: twitter.com
User-Agent: OpenWRTweet
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept: application/json, text/javascript, */*
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8
Content-Length: $CONTENT_LENGTH
Authorization: Basic $AUTHENTICATION

$TWEET"

echo "$MESSAGE" | telnet twitter.com 80 2>&1 > /dev/null

Save the script in a place that is in the path on the router, i.e /usr/bin/ or /bin/ and remember to make it executable by running chmod +x /path/to/tweet.

Run it like this: root@OpenWrt:~# tweet I am twetting from my OpenWrt router – beat that suckers!

Related posts:

• Startup script for transmission on OpenWrt.
• Transmission bittorrent client on OpenWRT
• OpenWrt USB automount on boot
• Controlling transmission using json-rpc in perl
• Goodbye twitter.com, hello identi.ca

Tags: howto, OpenWrt, twitter