Creating Follow Bot w/ NodeJS

Introduction

This tutorial will show you how to automatically follow users with a bot.

First, you will need to set-up a NodeJS development environment. You can follow along the tutorial at https://steemit.com/javascript/@money-dreamer/nodejs-steemit-bot-tutorial if you need to. That tutorial is a pre-requisite for this tutorial unless if you are already familiar with JavaScript, NodeJS, GIT and the Steemit API.

You can view the full source code at: https://github.com/AdamCox9/Steemit-Follow-Bot

After getting your development environment set-up, copy and paste this code into a file named follow_trending_authors.js and execute it like node follow_trending_authors.js from a terminal as described in the previous tutorial. This will bring in all the functions from the Steem library, set the user/pass and create a log-in session to the Steem blockchain. The followingArray saves the new account so no duplicate following attempts.

var steem = require('steem'); 
var username = 'ENTER_USERNAME_HERE'; 
var password = 'ENTER_PASSWORD_HERE'; 
var wif = steem.auth.toWif(username, password, 'posting');
var followingArray = [];

Let's get the trending categories in our initial call. You can view the data printed to the console to become familiar with it.

steem.api.getState('/trending', function(err, result) {
    console.log(err, result);
    ...
});

The sleep function will time out the script so it does not make requests too fast:

    function sleep(ms) {
      return new Promise(resolve => setTimeout(resolve, ms));
    }

Create a function that will loop over the accounts in the trending tag:

    async function followAccountsInTrending(result) {

        var content = result.content;
        var accounts = result.accounts;

        for(var attributename in accounts) {
            //console.log(attributename+': '+accounts[attributename]);
            var following = accounts[attributename].name;

            let followReq = ['follow']
            followReq.push({follower: username, following: following, what: ['blog']})

            const customJson = JSON.stringify(followReq)

            console.log( followReq );

            followingArray.indexOf(following) === -1 ?
                followingArray.push(following) : console.log('This item already exists');

            steem.broadcast.customJsonAsync(wif, [], [username], 'follow', customJson)
              .then(console.log)
              .catch(console.log)

             await sleep(30000);

             console.log( followingArray );

        }

    }

Create a function that loops over each category:

    async function startFollowAccountsInTrending(result) {
        var trending_tags = result.tag_idx.trending;
        for(var attributename in trending_tags) {
            console.log(attributename+': '+trending_tags[attributename]);

            steem.api.getState('/trending/'+trending_tags[attributename], function(err, result) {
                followAccountsInTrending(result);
            });

            await sleep(30000);

        }
    }

Initialize the function to loop through the categories:

    startFollowAccountsInTrending(result);

Further Development

It will allow you to set parameters to select who to follow. Some of these parameters will be:

• SBD/STEEM Balance
• Reputation
• Number of Followers
• Number of Following
• Total Author Rewards
• Total Curation Rewards

You can view the full source code at: https://github.com/AdamCox9/Steemit-Follow-Bot

Proof of Work:

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