Tweet your ‘apt-get’! Let Twitter keep track of whatever you install in Ubuntu

If you are like me who often likes to test one of the thousand applications available for Ubuntu and like to keep track of whatever you install or remove, here is a script for you. This script, tapt, tweets whatever you install, remove or perform other operations with ‘apt-get’ in Ubuntu to your Tweeter account.

I often install/remove applications and then forget what I installed/removed filling up hard disk with those applications which I am never going to use. Sometimes, I try to keep the track of whatever I installed writing down the name of applications in a plain text file. That is tedious. I then decided to write this script. Not only it keeps the track of whatever you ‘apt’-get but also allows you to perform multiple apt tasks at once unlike ‘apt-get’ such as removing one application, installing two more applications, and autocleaning at the same time with just one command. Let’s get started:

1. I suggest you to sign up for a new Twitter account which will be used just to post your apt-get activities. Give a name such as yourRegularTwitterUsername_tapt. Mine is ashokgelal_tapt
2. Download this script and make it executable:
   $ chmod 755 tapt
3. Open the script with any text editor and look for the following lines. They are on the top of the file.
   username=”yourusername”
   password=”yourpassword”
   Replace yourusername with your Twitter username and yourpassword with your Twitter password. If you don’t want to save your username and password in a plain text file, you can pass username and password as command line arguments; so you can skip this step.
4. Copy the file to /usr/bin
   $ sudo cp tapt /usr/bin

That’s it! Now you just need to know a couple of options. Here are some examples:

• sudo tapt -i rar -m "I got this from quicktweaks.com"
This installs rar and tweets the following message to your Twitter account:
  I got this from quicktweaks.com. Installed rar.
  
• sudo tapt -i dia
Passing your own message is not mandatory. If you want to post some message too, try to limit your message. Twitter allows only upto 140 characters. If the length of the final message (your own message+tapt installation message) totals to more than 140 characters, it won’t tweet your message, and won’t install/ remove anything.
• sudo tapt -r rar
  This removes rar and tweets the following message:
  Removed rar.
  
• sudo tapt -i rar -r dia
This installs rar, removes dia and then tweets installation and removal message.
• sudo tapt -r dia -u username -p password
You can pass username and password if you don’t like to save your password on tapt file of if you wan’t to tweet to a different account.
• sudo tapt -h
Displays tapt usage
• sudo tapt -o
Displays a full list of available options

I will continuously update the script some keep coming back. Comments and suggestions on tapt are always welcome. If you have any better ideas on its improvement, let me know.

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