Scrapping Tweets About Buhari, Osinbajo and Trends: How To Schedule R Scripts To Run Daily Using Windows Task Scheduler

Today (5th June, 2017), I finally got around to doing the R script that will daily mine social media data off Twitter about conversations around President Buhari, Acting President Osinbajo and whatever is trending in Nigeria twittosphere. Will keep it running to do fun or even commercial projects in and beyond 2019 (election year).

The interesting challenge there was to schedule this to run daily, saving the tweets in a CSV file incrementally.

I found two ways online -- the familiar Windows Task Scheduler way and using taskscheduleR

I already use Windows Task Scheduler for a couple of Python scripts and familiar with the setup, so I decided to go along with it.

It is straightforward to use. I have broken the entire process into two steps:

Step 1: Create a Batch file to run the R script
Create an empty text file and save it as .bat file. Then get the executable path of your R installation. Mine is C:\Program Files\Microsoft\MRO-3.3.1\bin\R.exe

Also get the path of your R script. 

Now set up the .bat file like I did mine below

@echo off
"C:\Program Files\Microsoft\MRO-3.3.1\bin\R.exe" CMD BATCH "C:\Users\Michael Olafusi\Documents\TwitterScrapper.R"

Step 2: Create the Scheduler Task
Launch the Task Scheduler (just search for it if you use Windows 10, 8 and 7).

In the Task Scheduler window, at the right pane, click on Create Task.

And follow my screenshot guide below.

And that is it!

And that's how I scheduled the R script to daily mine tweets about Buhari, Osinbajo, Biafra and what's trending in Nigeria.

I intend to do a trend sentimental analysis on them going into the Election days in 2019.