Search code examples
rubycachingmemcachedsinatradalli

Store Twitter timeline in cache (using Sinatra)?

I'm making a basic Sinatra application to display a user's Twitter mentions timeline using the Twitter gem. After logging in, I fetch his/her mentions. Something like:

get '/' do
  @mentions = Twitter.mentions_timeline

  erb :home
end

The issue with this is that I am making a call to the Twitter API every single time the user hits the homepage. I get rate limited and it's also not efficient, since I only want to re-fetch the mentions timeline, say, every 3 minutes. Or if it's simpler, I could just use the cache once I hit the rate limit.

After reading up, it seems like the best way to do this would be store this data in cache so I don't keep making API requests. How would I go about doing that?

Solution

  • I do this by storing the tweets in redis. I am loading the tweets in a helper function, so that I can access the same cached copy in multiple routes.

    All my code is on https://github.com/timmillwood/millwoodonline/blob/master/helpers/main.rb#L38 feel free to take what you need.