How to save tweets from TweetStream with SQLite3 and Ruby - ruby

Question

I am very new to ruby and RoR. I would like to save incoming tweets that are currently being displayed on my terminal. Could you explain why the tweets are not being saved?
I run " ruby mine_tweets.rb" in the terminal and the the "puts" of the status.text appears, but there are no entries in the database.
mine_tweets.rb
require 'rubygems'
require 'tweetstream'
puts "searching for turkey....should write to database"
TweetStream.configure do |config|
config.consumer_key = 'XXXXXXX'
config.consumer_secret = 'XXXXXXX'
config.oauth_token = 'XXXXXXX'
config.oauth_token_secret = 'XXXXXXX'
config.auth_method = :oauth
end
# search for "turkey" and will print text and screen name and should store other values in db
TweetStream::Client.new.track('turkey') do |status|
puts status.text + " FROM: #" + status.user.screen_name
Tweet.create(:user_id => status.user.id, :tweet_text => status.text, :screen_name =>status.user.screen_name)
Tweet.save!
end
#client = TweetStream::Client.new
#client.on_delete do |status_id, user_id|
Tweet.delete(status_id)
end
model/tweets.rb
class Tweet < ActiveRecord::Base
attr_accessible :screen_name, :tweet_text, :user_id
end

Answer 1

I recently struggled through this myself. Here is what I found:
In order to save to a database, you need to :
create a database.
connect application to db.
create table and columns
..do something, ie. save, query etc.
close connection (before exiting app)
Here is how i was able to save tweets from the Tweet Stream api into a sqlite local database. (I highly recommend switching directly to Postgres since Heroku doesn't support sqlite).
tweetstream.rb
require 'sqlite3'
require 'tweetstream'
KEY = 'xxx'
SECRET = 'xxx'
TOKEN = 'xxx'
TOKEN_SECRET = 'xxx'
SEARCH_TERMS = "your search terms"
begin
db = SQLite3::Database.open "./db/tweets.db"
db.execute "CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS store_tweets(
id, INTEGER PRIMARY KEY,
tweetid TEXT,
text TEXT,
screen_name TEXT,
userid TEXT,
user_name TEXT,
profile_image_url TEXT,
language,
created_at TEXT,
received_at TIMESTAMPS)"
TweetStream.configure do |config|
config.consumer_key = KEY
config.consumer_secret = SECRET
config.oauth_token = TOKEN
config.oauth_token_secret = TOKEN_SECRET
config.auth_method = :oauth
end
TweetStream::Client.new.track(SEARCH_TERMS) do |status|
puts "#{status.text}"
db.execute( "INSERT INTO store_tweets(
'tweetid',
'text',
'screen_name',
'userid',
'user_name',
'profile_image_url',
'language')
VALUES (?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?)",
[status[:id]],
[status.text],
[status.user.screen_name],
[status.user[:id]],
[status.user.name],
[status.user.profile_image_url],
[status.lang])
end
rescue SQLite3::Exception => e
puts "Exception occured"
puts e
ensure
db.close if db
end