Using maker channel of IFTTT with Starling

Sandeep (talk) 12:05, 5 December 2015 (IST)

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A few days back I was integrating twitter to show feeds on starling, then I realized the things people will try displaying on starling would be numerous. In fact it would just too much of work on everyones end to make and use web REST APIs. Then, Josh Lifton of CrowdSupply had suggested using IFTTT. It works on a very simple principle. If This Than That. This can be any of the 250+ services it supports and that happens to be starling in our case.

Okay, let me show you a simple use case with twitter:

Display tweet on starling with hastag #IndvsSA

Creating a recipe on IFTTT is as good as eating a piece of cake. There are only 2 things.

Trigger: search for #IndVsSA on twitter

Action: send a post request on maker channel

Code to handle the post

The code does not do any authentication as of now, will do it some time.

var express = require('express');
var app = express();
var bodyParser = require('body-parser');
app.use(bodyParser.json()); // support json encoded bodies
app.use(bodyParser.urlencoded({ extended: true })); // support encoded bodies
app.use( function(req, res, next) {
  res.header('Access-Control-Allow-Origin', '*');
  res.header('Access-Control-Allow-Methods', 'GET,PUT,POST,DELETE,OPTIONS');
  res.header('Access-Control-Allow-Headers', 'X-Requested-With, X-HTTP-Method-Override, Content-Type, Accept');
  next();
});
 
app.get('/', function (req, res) {
  res.send('Starling Ifttt test');
});
 
// create application/json parser
var jsonParser = bodyParser.json();
 
// create application/x-www-form-urlencoded parser
var urlencodedParser = bodyParser.urlencoded({ extended: false })
 
// POST /login gets urlencoded bodies
app.post('/maker', urlencodedParser, function (req, res) {
	console.log(req.body.source);
	console.log(req.body.message);
	res.send('request successful!');
});
 
var server = app.listen(3000, function () {
  var host = server.address().address;
  var port = server.address().port;
  console.log('Example app listening at http://%s:%s', host, port);
});

The decoded message can easily be sent to starling, which I will cover in the next post. By the way there was flood of tweets, here is one!