Twitter API: Uploading Videos using Node.js

I work for an influencer marketing and data company, Speaker, and we work with social media APIs all the time. This can be… challenging (to put it lightly!).One particularly difficult task has been posting videos to Twitter. If you search the internet, it seems we’re all trying to figure this out and there isn’t a clear answer. In my opinion, the best Twitter package for Node.js is Twit, but uploading videos using Twit isn’t explained well in the docs. Good news for you – I’ve gone through the pain, and frustration so you don’t have to.

Here’s how I upload videos to Twitter using Node.js (version 6 or greater) and Twit (version 2.2.5).

Below, I provide two solutions (both use Twit):

Uploading to Twitter when you have the video saved to disk already.
Uploading a video when you need to first retrieve the video from remote storage, like an AWS S3 bucket.
Video Format Warning
Make sure the video is the correct format. Smartphone videos are often a safe bet, but they don’t always work. The requirements are outlined in the infamously unhelpful 

Formatting a Video for Testing Purposes
Here’s a great trick I learned from my web searches:

Open your video in QuickTime.
From the File menu, select Export.
Choose the iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch… export option.
Choose any iPhone format.
Once it’s converted, change the file type to .mp4 by renaming the file.

Twitter Video Upload: Three Steps
Uploading a video to Twitter involves three steps:

ONE: POST (upload) the video (line 33 below).

Then, using the data returned from #1…
TWO: POST the returned meta-data (line 38 below).

THREE: POST the status, i.e. the actual tweet (line 44 below).

I haven’t included my error handling, because it is specific to the app I’m working on. Be sure to include error handling for all three steps (also for retrieving and reading the file, if you’re fetching it from remote storage)

1. Install the Necessary Packages: To upload videos using Node.js, you will need to install a few packages. First, install the Node.js package manager, npm. Then, install the Node.js file uploader package, multer. Finally, install the Node.js video streaming package, m3u8.

2. Create a Server: Create a server using Node.js and Express. This will be the starting point of your application.

3. Create a Route for the file Upload: Create a route in your server to handle file uploads. This route should be able to accept an uploaded file and save it to a specific location.

4. Create a file upload form: Create an HTML form that allows users to select and upload a video file. This form should use the route you created in step 3.

5. Process the Uploaded Video File: Once the video file has been uploaded to the server, you will need to process it so that it can be streamed. This can be done using the m3u8 package. You will need to convert the file into an HLS stream, which is a standard streaming format.

6. Stream.

Node.js is an open source server–side platform for building web applications. It is a powerful and efficient language that is well suited for developing video uploading applications. To upload videos using Node.js, you will need to use a library such as Multer or Formidable. These libraries provide useful methods that allow you to upload files from a form or directly from a browser. Additionally, you can use streaming APIs such as Streams to upload videos directly to a remote server. Once you have the library set up, you can start programming the upload process. You will need to create an endpoint in your server that will accept the video file and save it to a local directory or to a cloud service such as Amazon S3. After the video is uploaded, you can use an API to store its metadata such as title, description, and tags. Finally, you can use a library such as FFmpeg or VideoJS to encode the video in a web–ready format (such as MP4) and store it in a remote server. By following these steps, you can easily create a video uploading application with Node.js.