How to Syndicate to Twitter/X with GitHub Actions

My Twitter account had been peacefully lying dormant since November 18th, 2022, but so many people are still using X that I finally caved a few weeks ago and spent 45 minutes wiring up a syndication strategy, effectively adding it to this site's POSSE.

If you want to do this, here's what you'll need:

• The azu/rss-to-twitter GitHub Action and a modest amount of a free account's budget
• A Twitter developer account and app
• An Atom feed to read from (here's mine, specially crafted to cram the full content of each tweet in the <title> of each <entry>)
• The handle you're posting as must be marked as an automated account and registered as managed by some other account

Once you have all that, you can define a YAML file defining the action in your GitHub repo like the one for this site:

# .github/workflows/rss_to_twitter.yml
name: rss-to-twitter
on:
  schedule:
    - cron: "*/30 * * * *"
  workflow_dispatch:
jobs:
  twitter:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: azu/rss-to-twitter@v1
        with:
          RSS_URL: "https://justin.searls.co/shorter-form.xml"
          TWEET_TEMPLATE: '%title%'
          TWITTER_APIKEY: ${{ secrets.TWITTER_APIKEY }}
          TWITTER_APIKEY_SECRET: ${{ secrets.TWITTER_APIKEY_SECRET }}
          TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN }}
          TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET: ${{ secrets.TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET }}

The above cron schedule translates to checking the Atom feed "every 30 minutes", which is more frequent than it needs to be in my case. And as for all those ${{ secrets… }} directives, here's how to configure your repository's GitHub Action secrets.

And that's it. Easy!