How to stop and restart a twitter stream with ntwitter

Question

I'm new to node.js so please excuse the simple question. I'm writing something standard: a rest API that goes to twitter using ntwitter and saves stuff on mysql. What I'm having trouble is disconnecting and connecting back to twitter using ntwitter.

I checked a somewhat similar question to mine but that one is still unanswered: Restarting nodejs ntwitter twitter stream with different track keywords

The question is two fold:

1) How to check if the twit.stream is alive
2) How to kill it/manually disconnect from twitter

I'm using destroy but that does not seem to work. The relevant part of the code is:

if (values[0] == 'newStatusAdded') {
  console.log('Need to stop twitter listener');
  //check if twitter stream is running
  if (twit.stream) {
    twit.stream.destroy;
    debugger;
    console.log('Stopped twitter listener');
  }

thanks....

Answer 1

I think you have a setup somewhere in your code like this:

twit.stream('statuses/sample', function(stream) {
  stream.on('data', function (data) {
    console.log(data);
  });
});

Save the stream variable from within the callback, for example after stream.on():

  twit.currentTwitStream = stream;

This is only a suggestion. Perhaps you have a central configuration object which would be a better place for the current stream object. With currentTwitStream you can do this:

1. currentTwitStream.readable is false after an error or close.
2. currentTwitStream.destroy() destroys the stream.